This event was designed to advance the understanding of the economics of REDD by bringing together leading economists and scientists who have researched the topic and allowing them to present and discuss their methods and findings. The focus was on estimating the costs of REDD. Deforestation is responsible for about 20% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. The recent Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC decided to investigate the ways of including incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in a post-2012 climate change regime. The World Bank sponsored a learning event on May 27th, 2008 on the economics of deforestation and forest degradation, in particular the estimation of opportunity and implementation costs of REDD and the design of positive incentives for REDD. The World Bank is involved in several major initiatives specifically targeting the interface between forests and climate, including the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), which is created to build capacity and experience in REDD, and the low-carbon country case studies in Brazil and Mexico, which are designed to identify long-term climate change mitigation measures, including in the forest sector.Pagiola, World Bank Presentation materials : Overview of Approaches to Estimating the Costs of REDD I. Local Models – Moderator Stefano Pagiola, World Bank - Opportunity Costs of Carbon Emissions from Land use Change in the Tropical Forest Margins
(Brent Swallow. ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Nairobi, Kenya)
- Related paper:Opportunities for Avoided Deforestation with Sustainable Benefits
(Brent Swallow, Meine van Noordwijk, Sonya Dewi, Daniel Murdiyarso, Douglas White, Jim Gockowski, Glenn Hyman, Suseno Budidarsono, Valentina Robiglio, Vanessa Meadu, Andree Ekadinata, Fahmuddin Agus, Kurniatun Hairiah, Peter Mbile, Denis J. Sonwa, Stephan Weise)
- The Costs of Reducing Carbon Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in the Brazilian Amazon: Designing a Politically-Feasible Approach (Daniel Nepstad & Frank Merry. World Bank)
- Evaluating Policy Impacts on Tropical Deforestation: implications for REDD costs
(Alexander Pfaff. Duke University; Juan Robalino. CATIE)
- Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries (REDD) (Bernardo B.N. Strassburg – Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment)
II. Global Models – Moderator Marco Albani, McKinsey
Speakers’ and Moderators’ Biographies
Dr. Marco Albani is a consultant McKinsey & Company’s Toronto office. He is a Fellow
of McKinsey’s Climate Change Special Initiative and a core member of its Forestry
Interest Group. Before joining McKinsey, he was a research scientist and postdoctoral
fellow at Harvard University and Harvard Forest, specializing in carbon sequestration
in forest ecosystems, as well as a research associate in the forest policy group at the
European Forest Institute. Marco has an undergraduate degree in Forestry from the
University of Florence in Italy and a Ph.D. in Forest Sciences from the University of
British Columbia.
Dr. Douglas Boucher is Director of the Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative at the
Union of Concerned Scientists. Dr. Boucher has held various academic positions at
McGill University, the University of Québec and Hood College. He was also the
Washington Office Director of U.S. Representative Bernard Sanders (VT, At Large). He
earned a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan and
has published about 75 scientific peer-reviewed articles and books.
Dr. Frank Merry is currently Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center,
Researcher at the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM) in Santarém,
Brazil, and Adjunct research Scientist at Virginia Tech Department of Forestry. He has
published numerous articles on land and forest economics, including topics ranging
from forest policy and timber trade to the economics of smallholders and cattle
ranching. He is a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, and has worked in both the Amazon
and Africa. Merry is the lead economist of the Amazon Scenarios program where he is
responsible for the design of large scale spatially explicit rent models in the Amazon.
His research involves forest policy, international timber trade, the cattle and forestry
sectors, economic analysis of households, and forest industry change in the Amazon.
Dr. Dan Nepstad, a tropical forest ecologist has just joined the Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation from Woods Hole Research Center, where he was a Senior Scientist.
In addition, he is both Scientist and Founding President of IPAM, Belém, Brazil. He is
also Co-Founder of Aliança da Terra (Land Alliance), and Visiting Professor,
Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro. Nepstad is a past recepient of the Pew
Scholar Award in Conservation and Environment. Nepstad holds a Ph.D. in Forest
Ecology from Yale University, an M.S. in Plant Ecology/Botany from Michigan State
University, and a B.A. in Biology from Kalamazoo College. His scientific and
conservation interests include tropical forests, climate change, forest fire,
globalization, natural resource policy, and the “taming” of agro-industry. He has
published over 100 scientific articles and books. Dr. Michael Obersteiner is working in IIASA’s Forestry Program where he is the
principal investigator and scientific coordinator of a number of international reseach
projects in the land use domain. He has worked at IIASA since 2002 where he has been
dealing with structural change of the global forest sector, integrated scenarios of the
land use sector, terrestrial carbon management and stochastic energy systems
modeling. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Forestry, at the University of
Agriculture and Forestry in Vienna, Austria. He also holds a Ph.D. from the joint
program in economics, from Columbia University and the Institute for Advanced
Studies in Vienna. He has worked as a visiting scientist at the Institute for Economics
and Industrial Organization, the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in
Novosibirsk, Russia. Prior to that, he was a Fulbright Research Assistant at the College
of Forest Resources at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Obersteiner is also
a Research Economist with the Department of Economics and Finance at the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria. He has been a consultant to the European
Commission, the OECD, and several national governments. He has authored over 100
scientific papers and consultancy reports.
Dr. Stefano Pagiola is a Senior Environmental Economist in the World Bank’s
Environment Department. He leads the Bank’s work on Payments for Environmental
Services (PES). He has published extensively on PES and market-based instruments for
conservation more generally. He holds a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A.
and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining the World Bank in 1994, he taught
environmental economics at Stanford University. Dr. Alex Pfaff, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Economics and Environment at
Duke University, studies how economic development and the environment and natural
resources affect each other. He studies: impacts of roads, parks and payments on
deforestation (Brazilian Amazon, Costa Rica, Mexico); decisions that lower one's
exposure to stoves' indoor emissions (Pakistan, Tanzania, Ghana) and to arsenic in
drinking water (Bangladesh); responses to climate and water vulnerability (N.E. Brazil)
by households and by participatory water allocation committees; and the incentives
for firms to provide environmental information to regulators. The goal of this applied
research is to raise the chance that interventions have their intended impacts upon
the environment and natural resources while also benefiting the people that they are
designed to help.
Dr. Sathaye’s research interest in land-use change is focused on evaluation of
mitigation options in light of climate impacts in India, development of global models
for the evaluation of costs and potentials of forestry mitigation options, quantification
of transaction costs of forestry projects, and development of project-based
methodologies. He has published more than 150 articles, books and book chapters,
and reports in major energy and environment journals. He has been an author of nine
publications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990, and
was a co-Coordinating Lead Author for the Sustainable Development and Mitigation
chapter of Working Group III of the IPCC Fourth Assessment. IPCC was awarded the
2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He has consulted with the World Bank, Asian Development
Bank, United Nations Development Program, Global Environmental Facility, and other
major international organizations. He holds a B.Tech. (Hons.) degree from the Indian
Institute of Technology, Bombay and a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of
California, Irvine. He is currently a Senior Scientist, and Leader, International Energy
Studies Group at LBNL.
Dr. Brent Sohngen is a professor of environmental and natural resource economics in
the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at the
Ohio State University. His primary research interests lie in modeling land-use change,
assessing the economic efficiency of alternative policy instruments for non-point
source water pollution control, and estimating the economic benefits of improving
environmental resources. Sohngen has utilized market models to examine the
implications of ecological change for timber markets, and to assess the costs of carbon
sequestration in forests and agricultural soils. He leads an extension program in
environmental and resource economics that provides resources on benefit cost analysis
to Ohio policy-makers. Sohngen teaches a graduate and undergraduate course in
micro-economic theory, and environmental and resource economics.
Bernardo Strassburg
Bernardo Strassburg is currently a doctoral researcher in the School of Environmental
Sciences at the University of East Anglia and a member of the Centre for Social and
Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE). His research has been
exploring the economic incentives related to tropical deforestation and its insights for
the RED discussion. A native of Rio de Janeiro, Bernardo holds a degree in Economics
and a M.Sc. in Environmental Planning and has worked as an environmental analyst for
the Brazilian Ministry of Environment (Eastern Amazon) and as a consultant for the
World Bank. He is currently leading two research projects on the “Economics of
Climate Change in Brazil” study coordinated by the World Bank and the British
government.
Dr. Brent Swallow is a Principal Economist at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in
Nairobi, and Global Coordinator of the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) Partnership
for the Tropical Forest Margins. Brent leads ICRAF’s work on payments and rewards
for environmental services, which is implemented through networks of field sites and
partnerships stretching across Asia and Africa. Since becoming Global Coordinator in
early 2007, Brent has led the ASB Partnership to focus attention on the avoided
deforestation debate within the UNFCCC, particularly the potential for Reduced
Emissions Deforestation and forest Degradation to be attained with sustainable
benefits for forest margin communities. He is the lead author of a major cross-site
study of the opportunity costs of avoided deforestation that the ASB Partnership
released at the UNFCCC COP in Bali in December 2007. Brent is a national of Canada
and holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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