Carbon Balance and Management

Background: A mechanism for emission reductions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) is very likely to be included in a future climate agreement. The choice of REDD baseline methodologies will crucially influence the environmental and economic effectiveness of the climate regime. We compare three different historical baseline methods and one innovative dynamic model baseline approach to appraise their applicability under a future REDD policy framework using a weighted multi-criteria analysis. Results: The results show that each baseline method has its specific strengths and weaknesses. Although the dynamic model allows for the best environmental and for comparatively good economic performance, its high demand for data and technical capacity limit the current applicability in many developing countries. Conclusion: The adoption of a multi-tier approach will allow countries to select the baseline method best suiting their specific capabilities and data availability while simultaneously ensuring scientific transparency, environmental effectiveness and broad political support. Background Global forests can play a pivotal role in preventing dangerous climate change. Net forest cover increment in most temperate forests currently leads to carbon sequestration [1]. Also, the recent increase in CO2 concentrations and warming stimulates carbon uptake in temperate and boreal forests, although this will not continue indefinitely [2]. Deforestation, however, still occurs at a large scale in tropical and sub-tropical regions. Global carbon emissions from tropical deforestation and land-use change ranged from 0.8 to 2.4 Gt C yr-1 for the 1990s [3-5], accounting for 12–28% of the total annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions [6]. The thirteenth conference of the parties (COP 13) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 2007 at Bali provided a mandate to include measures for emission reductions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in the climate change mitigation framework from 2012 on [7]. Recent scientific and policy analyses paint an optimistic picture on the feasibility of such a REDD scheme [8-11]. One of the main remaining challenges on the way to an effective REDD mechanism is the choice of the methodology to set the so-called baseline or reference scenario. All climate protection activities through emission reduction Published: 13 July 2009 Carbon Balance and Management 2009, 4:4 doi:10.1186/1750-0680-4-4 Received: 29 April 2009 Accepted: 13 July 2009 This article is available from: http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/4/1/4 © 2009 Huettner et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.