Global Forest Carbon: Policy, Economics and Finance Chapter 10: Summary and outlook
Runsheng Yin
The forest sector can play a major role in mitigating climate change, and this role is based on the likely multitude and magnitude of actions to be undertaken in the sector. Encompassed in these actions are not just reducing CO2 emissions from deforestation and forest degradation but also removing CO2 emissions from the atmosphere through expanded forest coverage, improved forest management, and enhanced carbon stock in harvested wood products (IPCC 2020). Globally, land-based activities, including agriculture, forestry, wetlands, and bioenergy, could sustainably contribute about 30% (15 billion tons) of the CO2 equivalent per year required to limit the increase in the global temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by year 2050 (Roe et al. 2019). Forest sector activities alone could offer two-thirds of the cost-effective nature-based solutions necessary to hold warming to less than a 2.0°C increase (Griscom et al. 2017). Nonetheless, the international science and policy communities have encountered a series of questions in envisioning, designing, implementing, and evaluating concrete actions in the forest sector because of the lack of an adequate understanding of the fundamental policy, economics and finance. These questions include: 1. What are the essential principles and rules of carbon accounting and assessment? 2. Why do we need a jurisdictional approach to governing forest sector climate actions? 3. What are the core elements and modeling systems of forest carbon economic analyses? 4. How should we handle the local-level joint production of timber and carbon properly? 5. How can we assess the role of forest sector climate actions in national decarbonization? 6. What is the varied carbon leakage of wood product trade derived from alternative views? 7. How can we move forward with carbon finance and funding for forest sector actions? 8. What are the risk and uncertainty involved in climate change mitigation and adaptation? 9. Why should we adopt a social discount rate in analyzing public climate investment? 10. In what ways should we improve the quality of impact evaluations of carbon policies?
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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