On whether vegetation could contribute to major climate change mitigation efforts: forestry for carbon credits or carbon credits for forestry? A multi-criteria decision support model for forest carbon offsets

Abstract: The transition towards a less carbon-intensive society has been initiated. Still, the international climate policy arena is seeking a significant mitigation strategy. Land-Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) activities have been acknowledged to represent both a valid carbon dioxide reduction option through biological removal and a considerable source of greenhouse gas emissions at the same time, especially through deforestation. However, forest carbon credits are not being extensively purchased by government tendering and multinational banks. Moreover, the compliance market is generally failing to support sustainable development carbon projects while voluntary offsets appear in that sense more successful, yet less stringent. Therefore, this thesis questions the adequacy of the project-based approach to biological removal and points out other non-technical uncertainties prior to the scientific understanding of carbon sequestration. As a consequence of the inherent complexity of the socio-ecological system, it is argued that the currently low contribution of land-use offsets to climate change mitigation has been determined by the biased definition of win-win goals in the first place, rather than by wrongful implementation. The plausible conditions for the market development of forest carbon offsets have been extracted by means of formative scenario analysis, i.e. the qualitative description of how present potentials could be deployed into alternative futures. Whereas project quality and market price compete on different dimensions, several bonds among system variables seem to limit the degree of intervention over aspects such as standardisation and demand activity. As a result, forest carbon credits do not appear bound for much more than today's state of the art. Natural carbon sources alike, general recommendations to policy making translate into decoupling sinks from market-based mitigation strategies. Besides scenario construction modelling, the paper contributes with preliminary insights into the relationship between probability and desirability of different scenarios according to stakeholders' decision criteria.