Carbon credits and the conservation of natural areas

Abstract

Increasing the amount of organic-carbon stored in the biomass of terrestrial ecosystems is an effective way to reduce the net anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. This can be done by conserving existing ecological reservoirs of fixed organic-carbon, maintaining or enhancing the rate of sequestration, and restoring stocks that have been depleted by past land-use practices. Most trading systems for greenhouse-gas offsets recognize the validity of projects that gain ecological offsets, and permit them to sell carbon credits in an emerging marketplace for these novel commodities. Although ecological carbon-offset projects have been criticized from a variety of perspectives, most of the supposed problems can be satisfactorily mitigated. In addition to offsetting emissions of greenhouse gases, ecological projects that accumulate carbon credits may have a strong cross-linkage to the conservation of natural values, which in itself is an important action for society to undertake. This is, however, less of a consideration for projects that are based on anthropogenic ecosystems, such as no-till agricultural systems and plantation forests, which provide relatively few benefits to native biodiversity and might even detract from that objective if developed on newly converted natural habitat. Moreover, the existing rules for carbon-offset systems exclude some kinds of ecological projects from the trading markets, even though they would result in avoided emissions or enhanced sequestration of organic-carbon. As the emerging marketplace for carbon offsets grows, it will be important to understand the co-benefits and side effects of offset projects on non-carbon values, including native biodiversity.

A Participatory Approach to Evaluating Strategies for Forest Carbon Mitigation in British Columbia

“…Three other objectives rank higher in terms of relative importance in the Coastal region, and five other objectives in the Interior. This result is consistent with discussions worldwide about the important of considering co-benefits (e.g., poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation, and increase in soil and water quality) when using forests to mitigate climate change [51,52].…”

Remote Sensing of Aboveground Biomass in Tropical Secondary Forests: A Review

“…The effect of the increase in atmospheric carbon concentration on climate change is the flagship topic for the study and implementation of environmental carbon sinks as a result of the forest succession. The concept of carbon sinks has been criticized because of estimation biases and the difficulties associated with their quantification and verification using the available technology [61]. The difficulty in measuring changes in biomass and the lack of spatially explicit data are the main cause of variation among carbon estimates at the same area [44].…”

Long term carbon storage potential and CO 2 sink strength of a restored salt marsh in New Jersey

“…greater than 100 years) is a necessary first step (Freedman et al, 2009;Hansen, 2009). Moreover, solid baselines for accretion rates and quantifiable carbon flows would also be critical to any future CO 2 emission reduction program.…”