| dc.description.abstract | Facing the current climate crisis, forest carbon offset projects have gained attention due to the
strong carbon sequestration capacity of forests and have been widely applied globally. The
carbon credits generated by these projects can be traded on the carbon market, which allows
emitters to reduce their net emission by buying these credits. These projects are also claimed
to have co-benefits on other ecosystem services such as biodiversity, water and soil
conservation, which are closely related to composition, structure and function of the ecosystem.
However, more doubts about the effectiveness of these projects have been raised recently,
which requires closer examination of the ex-post environmental impacts of these projects.
Moreover, there is a lack of impact methodology used to assess non-carbon environmental
impacts in the project protocols, making the impact assessment of non-carbon attributes
difficult and thus usually overlooked. This article aims to answer two questions through
literature review: What are the ex-post environmental impacts of forest carbon offset projects?
What are the potential impact methodologies that could be integrated into FRR projects under
carbon market mechanism to assess non-carbon environmental effects? The results showed an
overestimation of carbon sequestration and climate mitigation effect of forest carbon offset
projects and the lack of systematically designed assessment studies in non-carbon
environmental impacts. Thus, we know very little about the environmental impacts of these
projects apart from the carbon aspect. This further proves the current need of developing
protocols to assess non-carbon ecosystem attributes. The review of the second question gave
an overview of the currently available indicators and methods used to assess forest restoration
success as potential options of choice. Although the development of the indicators is relatively
mature, traditional sampling methods are time-consuming and expensive, making it difficult to
apply to large scale projects and remote sensing technology cannot guarantee the measurement
of some important indicators. To conclude, there is an overestimation of climate mitigation
effects of forest carbon offset projects and we know little about the non-carbon environmental
impacts of these projects. Measures are needed to improve the performance of these projects
in climate mitigation and studies are needed in finding more cost-effective sampling
methodology for different non-carbon indicators. More attention should also be paid to
incentivize the evaluation of non-carbon ecosystem attributes, which is crucial in accelerating
the development of relevant protocols. | |
