Payments for adding ecosystem carbon are mostly beneficial to biodiversity (original) (raw)

Carbon and Biodiversity Policies

U.Porto Journal of Engineering

Wildfires are a concern in many European countries, and they might occur more frequently given climate change. Carbon sequestration is an ecosystem service provided by forests that is affected by fires and is neglected in traditional markets. Recently, the European Union (EU) has created environmental policies that address climate change, wildfires, and biodiversity conservation through payment for ecosystem services schemes. This study aims to estimate the monetary carbon savings of avoiding wildfires in five Mediterranean countries using historical wildfire emissions data and the auction prices in the EU Carbon Market. Portugal is further studied since the country has a new ecosystem services payment policy. The results indicate that, by avoiding fires, the countries could have annual benefits in the order of millions of euros. For Portugal, the value of the policy incentive is inferior to the value of the carbon sequestration service provided by avoiding fires and could be reexam...

Synergies and Trade-Offs between Biodiversity and Carbon in Ecological Compensation

Sustainability

Ecological compensation, which is widely applied, is presumed to be an important mechanism to address environmental degradation that commonly occurs due to activities related to development projects and resource use. The objectives of this review are to investigate synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity and carbon offset, the challenges in their implementation, and the potential of biodiversity and/or carbon offsets to be used as a proxy for other ecosystem functions in the implementation of ecological compensation. In comparison to carbon offsets, the implementation of biodiversity offsets are more challenging due to difficulties in biodiversity measurement, determining ecological equivalence, the relatively longer time taken, the higher level of uncertainty, the uniqueness of ecosystems, and the irreversibility of species loss. Generally, there is a positive relationship between biodiversity and carbon stocks; however, there are also cases where there are no clear or even n...

Seeing REDD: Reducing Emissions and Conserving Biodiversity by Avoiding Deforestation

Journal of Sustainable Forestry, 2012

Protection of existing forests through Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)—a system of providing incentives for reduced deforestation—has the potential to deliver both climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation benefits. This article explores how these complementary environmental goals can be supported by international payments for ecosystem services (IPES) via the emerging global carbon market. REDD, through an IPES framework, offers an opportunity to “bundle” payments for reduced emissions with payments for biodiversity conservation in order to allow for cost-sharing between the multiple beneficiaries of REDD. The article outlines two potential cost-sharing arrangements between carbon investors financing reduced emissions and the beneficiaries of biodiversity conservation provided by REDD. One scheme combines finances from general biodiversity beneficiaries as a whole with carbon investments in REDD through a global “fund”; a second scheme matches payments from specific biodiversity beneficiaries with investments in REDD through a payment “partnership” between both groups. Each scheme falls on either end of a spectrum of opportunities for bundling payments for different environmental benefits into one investment in REDD. The discussion is intended to incite further dialogue on potential systems for implementing the emerging concept of bundling payments for ecosystem services.