Carbon Balance and Management

Carbon Balance and Management

Research

BioMed Central

Open Access

Predicting the deforestation-trend under different carbon-prices

GeorgEKindermann*1,2, MichaelObersteiner1,3, EwaldRametsteiner1,2 and

IanMcCallum1

Address: 1International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria, 2University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria and 3Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna, Austria

Email: GeorgEKindermann*-kinder@iiasa.ac.at; MichaelObersteiner-oberstei@iiasa.ac.at; EwaldRametsteiner-ramet@iiasa.ac.at; IanMcCallum-mccallum@iiasa.ac.at* Corresponding author

Published: 06 December 2006

Carbon Balance and Management 2006, 1:15

doi:10.1186/1750-0680-1-15

This article is available from: /content/1/1/15

Received: 13 October 2006Accepted: 06 December 2006

© 2006 Kindermann et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Background: Global carbon stocks in forest biomass are decreasing by 1.1 Gt of carbon annually,owing to continued deforestation and forest degradation. Deforestation emissions are partly offsetby forest expansion and increases in growing stock primarily in the extra-tropical north. Innovativefinancial mechanisms would be required to help reducing deforestation. Using a spatially explicitintegrated biophysical and socio-economic land use model we estimated the impact of carbon priceincentive schemes and payment modalities on deforestation. One payment modality is adding costsfor carbon emission, the other is to pay incentives for keeping the forest carbon stock intact.Results: Baseline scenario calculations show that close to 200 mil ha or around 5% of todays forestarea will be lost between 2006 and 2025, resulting in a release of additional 17.5 GtC. Today'sforest cover will shrink by around 500 million hectares, which is 1/8 of the current forest cover,within the next 100 years. The accumulated carbon release during the next 100 years amounts to45 GtC, which is 15% of the total carbon stored in forests today. Incentives of 6 US$/tC forvulnerable standing biomass payed every 5 year will bring deforestation down by 50%. This willcause costs of 34 billion US$/year. On the other hand a carbon tax of 12 $/tC harvested forestbiomass will also cut deforestation by half. The tax income will, if enforced, decrease from 6 billionUS$ in 2005 to 4.3 billion US$ in 2025 and 0.7 billion US$ in 2100 due to decreasing deforestationspeed.

Conclusion: Avoiding deforestation requires financial mechanisms that make retention of forestseconomically competitive with the currently often preferred option to seek profits from other landuses. Incentive payments need to be at a very high level to be effective against deforestation. Taxeson the other hand will extract budgetary revenues from the regions which are already poor. Acombination of incentives and taxes could turn out to be a viable solution for this problem.Increasing the value of forest land and thereby make it less easily prone to deforestation would actas a strong incentive to increase productivity of agricultural and fuelwood production, which couldbe supported by revenues generated by the deforestation tax.