I think that I shall never see (hor ellipsis) a lovely forestry policy: Land use programs for conservation of forests

摘要

Forestry programs are frequently invoked as having potential for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Most studies have attempted to quantify the potential impact of forest programs on carbon uptake and the potential costs of such programs. In this paper, we will attempt instead to focus on the institutional issues of the implementation of forestry programs for carbon sequestration. In particular, we explore the challenges for implementing forest programs that are: of increasing technological complexity; and in settings that depart significantly from the idealized conditions of economic models. We start in Section 1 by examining a suite of instruments that are commonly employed to implement a given policy. Section 2 examines a relatively simple case -- a tree-planting program in the US -- and demonstrates that there are significant difficulties involved in implementing a carbon sequestration program, even in a well-developed market economy. Section 3 focuses on other technologies in the US and why the choice of policy instruments and program design is more difficult than for the simple tree-planting case. Section 4 considers implementation of forestry policies in other countries where the economies may bear less resemblance to the ideal market economy than the US. In those settings, the choice of policy instruments may be very sensitive to non-market considerations that are often missed in conventional policy and cost analysis.