Climate Policy

Climate Policy 5 (2005) 433–443

Research Article

Reducing carbon transaction costs in community-based forest management

Margaret M Skutsch

Received 25 February 2004 ; received in revised form 21 September 2005 ; accepted 28 September 2005

The article considers the potential for community-based forest management (of existing forests) in developing countries, as a future CDM strategy, to sequester and mitigate carbon and to claim credits in future commitment periods. This kind of forestry is cost-effective, and should bring many more benefits to local populations than do afforestation and reforestation, thus contributing more strongly to sustainable development. However, community forest management projects are small-scale, and the transaction costs associated with justifying them as climate projects are likely to be high. A research project being carried out in five developing countries is testing carbon measurement and monitoring methods which can be carried out by community members with very little formal education, which should greatly reduce these transaction costs. Using hand-held computers with GIS capability and attached GPS, villagers with 4 years of primary education are able to accurately map their forest resource and input biomass data from sample plots into a program which calculates carbon values.

Keywords: Deforestation; Transaction costs; Participatory carbon measuring and monitoring; P-GIS; Environmental service payments; LULUCF

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