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Designing cost-efficient payments for forest-based carbon sequestration: An auction-based modeling approach

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  • Sharma, Bijay P.
  • Cho, Seong-Hoon
  • Yu, T. Edward

Abstract

Conservation auctions can reveal information about the opportunity costs of afforestation, which can be combined with the carbon sequestration benefits of land-use changes to design cost-efficient payment systems. Furthermore, the impact of integrating cost-benefit information to ensure efficiency gains or to ensure minimal efficiency losses in multi-round conservation auctions, where landowners learn to extract information rents, depends on the level of correlation between costs and benefits. Incorporating discriminatory-price auction theory, and an agent-based model, simulated data are used to examine the cost-efficiency of cost-ranked and cost-benefit-ranked auction-based payment designs for forest-based carbon storage for alternative levels of correlation between afforestation opportunity costs and carbon sequestration capacities in static and dynamic settings. Results show that the cost-benefit-ranked design is more cost-efficient than the cost-ranked design in a static setting even though the relative spatial heterogeneities of costs and benefits are identical. More importantly, the cost-efficiency of the cost-benefit-ranked design is generally robust to deterioration as bidders learn over repeated auction rounds, compared with the cost-ranked design, and more resistant to deterioration for some levels of correlation.

Suggested Citation

  • Sharma, Bijay P. & Cho, Seong-Hoon & Yu, T. Edward, 2019. "Designing cost-efficient payments for forest-based carbon sequestration: An auction-based modeling approach," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 182-194.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:forpol:v:104:y:2019:i:c:p:182-194
    DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2019.04.018
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    Cited by:

    1. Seong-Hoon Cho & Bijay P. Sharma, 2020. "Optimal spatial budget distribution of forest carbon payments that balances the returns and risks associated with conservation costs," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 22(8), pages 7239-7267, December.
    2. Thang Quyet Nguyen & Nguyen Tan Huynh & Wen-Kai K. Hsu, 2021. "Estimate the Impact of Payments for Environmental Services on Local Livelihoods and Environment: An Application of Propensity Scores," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(3), pages 21582440211, August.
    3. Sharma, Bijay P. & Cho, Seong-Hoon, 2021. "Analyzing how forest-based amenity values and carbon storage benefits affect spatial targeting for conservation investment," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).

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