An empirically-derived mechanism of combined incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation

Despite accounting for 17-25% of anthropogenic emissions, deforestation was not included in the Kyoto Protocol. The UN Convention on Climate Change has recently decided to include it in future agreements and asked its scientific board to study methodological and scientific issues related to positive incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation. Here we present an empirically derived mechanism that offers a mix of incentives to developing countries to curb their emissions from deforestation while including important guaranties to the financing community. We use recent data both to model its effects on the 20 most forested developing countries and to produce empirical global cost curves of avoiding deforestation. Results show that at very low CO2 prices (~US$5.5/t) a successful mechanism could reduce 90% of global deforestation.