Related papers: Action needed to make carbon offsets from tropical…
Along with the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the loss of primary forests and other natural ecosystems is a major disruption of the Earth system causing global concern. Quantifying planetary warming from carbon emissions,…
Independent retrospective analyses of the effectiveness of reducing deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects are vital to ensure climate change benefits are being delivered. A recent study in Science by West et al. (1) appeared…
Carbon offset programs are critical in the fight against climate change. One emerging threat to the long-term stability and viability of forest carbon offset projects is wildfires, which can release large amounts of carbon and limit the…
Forest biomass is a key influence for future climate, and the world urgently needs highly scalable financing schemes, such as carbon offsetting certifications, to protect and restore forests. Current manual forest carbon stock inventory…
The voluntary carbon market is an important building block in the fight against climate change. However, it is not trivial for consumers to verify whether carbon offset projects deliver what they promise. While technical solutions for…
The growing urgency of the climate crisis has driven the implementation of diverse policy instruments to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Among them, carbon pricing mechanisms such as carbon taxes and emissions trading systems…
Afforestation and reforestation are popular strategies for mitigating climate change by enhancing carbon sequestration. However, the effectiveness of these efforts is often self-reported by project developers, or certified through processes…
Forests are vital for the wellbeing of our planet. Large and small scale deforestation across the globe is threatening the stability of our climate, forest biodiversity, and therefore the preservation of fragile ecosystems and our natural…
Policies to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss often assume that protecting carbon-rich forests provides co-benefits in terms of biodiversity, due to the spatial congruence of carbon stocks and biodiversity at biogeographic…
An increasing amount of companies and cities plan to become CO2-neutral, which requires them to invest in renewable energies and carbon emission offsetting solutions. One of the cheapest carbon offsetting solutions is preventing…
Afforestation greatly influences several earth system processes, making it essential to understand these effects to accurately assess its potential for climate change mitigation. Although our understanding of forest-climate system…
Carbon taxes are increasingly popular among policymakers but remain politically contentious. A key challenge relates to their distributional impacts; the extent to which tax burdens differ across population groups. As a response, a growing…
The boreal forest plays a crucial role as a global carbon sink. This study uses two 250-year simulations of Canada's Taiga Plains, an area targeted by the 2 Billion Trees Program to evaluate afforestation and reforestation strategies that…
Forest carbon offsets are increasingly popular and can play a significant role in financing climate mitigation, forest conservation, and reforestation. Measuring how much carbon is stored in forests is, however, still largely done via…
Reconciling agricultural production with climate-change mitigation is a formidable sustainability problem. Retaining trees in agricultural systems is one proposed solution, but the magnitude of the current and future-potential benefit that…
A nondestructive method for estimating the amount of carbon stored by individuals, communities, vegetation types, and coverages, as well as their volume and aboveground biomass, is presented. This methodology is based on information on…
Rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change threaten to destabilize key planetary carbon pools, especially the Earth's forests which link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate. To the extent…
Effective climate action depends on dismantling the assumptions and oversimplifications that have become the basis of climate policy. The assumption that greenhouse gases (GHG) are fungible and the use of single-point values in normalizing…
We propose a method for causal inference using satellite image time series, in order to determine the treatment effects of interventions which impact climate change, such as deforestation. Simply put, the aim is to quantify the 'before…
Feeding a larger and wealthier global population without transgressing ecological limits is increasingly challenging, as rising food demand (especially for animal products) intensifies pressure on ecosystems, accelerates deforestation, and…