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Neither the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) nor the Kyoto Protocol include a satisfying mechanism for reducing the substantial emissions from deforestation which are responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is acknowledged that planting forests, for example through afforestation and reforestation in the Clean Development Mechanism, clearly provides an opportunity to sequester carbon in vegetation and soils. However, it takes decades to restore carbon stocks that have been lost as a result of land‐use changes. Reducing the rate of deforestation is the only effective way to reduce carbon losses from forest ecosystems. As negotiations on a post‐Kyoto agreement have already started the authors argue that a complete and fair post‐Kyoto regime will have to expand existing regulations by creating a framework to encompass all land‐use and forest‐related changes in carbon stocks. Developing countries administer the majority of the world's environmental resources and provide a vital global public good by maintaining environmental assets. However, with increasing pressure on development and the use of resources, developing countries can hardly be expected to provide these services free. Therefore, they will have to be integrated into a more comprehensive incentive framework which also rewards forestry conservation, sustainable forest management and afforestation. The authors discuss how an incentive system for the protection of forests can be included in a future climate regime. Different design choices are considered and two recent approaches to reward developing countries that avoid further deforestation are compared: the ‘compensated reduction of deforestation’ approach and the Carbon Stock Approach.
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