Carbon pricing could save millions of hectares of tropical forest: new study

A new study finds that putting a price on carbon could drastically reduce the amount of deforestation in the tropics by 2050: $20 per metric ton (about $18/short ton) could diminish deforestation by nearly 16 percent and the associated burst of carbon released into the atmosphere by nearly 25 percent. In research first released in 2015 that’s now been published in the January edition of the journal Environmental Research Letters, the authors project that we could lose an India-sized chunk of tropical forest in the next 32 years. Their work involved examining satellite maps of past deforestation from the University of Maryland in concert with economic analysis to figure out how “carbon pricing” could help shift these trends. Deforestation in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. Critical to their calculations was a nuanced understanding not just of how much forest humans might cut down by 2050, but where and how fast it’s likely to occur. In their analysis, the team kept finding the same pattern of deforestation “over and over again,” said co-author and environmental economist Jonah Busch at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. “First come the tiny little cuts,” Busch said. “Maybe it’s a road, maybe it’s selective logging that just barely shows up.” After those initial pulses, deforestation has a tendency to speed up considerably, until reaching a point when the dwindling amount of forest left begins to drag the rate back down. Busch and fellow economist and co-author Jens Engelmann didn’t come up with…

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