Special issue on estimation of baselines and leakage in carbon mitigation forestry projects

Excerpt

There is growing acceptance that the environmental benefits of forests extend beyond traditional ecological benefits and include the mitigation of climate change. Interest in forestry mitigation activities has led to the inclusion of forestry practices at the project level in international agreements. Climate change activities place new demands on participating institutions to set baselines, establish additionality, determine leakage, ensure permanence, and monitor and verify a project’s greenhouse gas benefits. These issues are common to both forestry and other types of mitigation projects. They demand empirical evidence to establish conditions under which such projects can provide sustained long term global benefits. This Special Issue reports on papers that experiment with a range of approaches based on empirical evidence for the setting of baselines and estimation of leakage in projects in developing Asia and Latin America. …