Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Carbon emissions from deforestation in 2005 is 1.1 GtC/year and decreases to
0.68 GtC/year in 2025 and further to 0.09 GtC/year in 2100. The accumulated carbon
release during the next 100 years amounts to 45 GtC which is 15% of the total carbon
stored in forests today. To bring deforestation down by 50%, incentives of 6 US$/tC/5
year or a land clearance tax of between 9 US$/tC and 25 US$/tC would be necessary,
depending whether the harvested wood is burned on the spot (e.g., slash-and-burn
agriculture) or sold. In the latter case, a higher carbon tax of up to 25 US$/tC is neces-
sary to effectively reduce incentives to deforest, to a degree that cuts overall global
deforestation by 50%. If the wood is further used and converted into products, only
18% of the biomass could be saved by a carbon price of 9 US$/tC, caused by the com-
pensating effect of an income by selling wood and a longer time-period for releasing
carbon. On the other hand, if the carbon price is 25$/tC and the wood is assumed to be
slash burned, the reduction of deforestation calculated to be 91% (Figure 11 and 12).
On a fi rst sight it seems, that incentive payments might be more effective, than taxa-
tion. However, incentives payment contracts have to be renewed every 5 year for the
actual standing biomass and the change of biomass has to be known to detect a breach
of the contract, while a deforestation tax will be payed once for the harvested biomass
once detected by targeted earth observation systems (see Figures 13 and 14). In the
latter, transactions costs for implementing avoided deforestation are small.
Figure 12.
Population density in year 2000. Grids with few people are given in white. A rising
population density is marked by gray up to high population densities (
≥
1,000 people/km
2
) which are
indicated by black.
