A Carbon Sequestration Supply Function and Development of Feasible Clean Development Mechanism Rules for Tropical Forest Carbon Sinks

Despite growing policy interest in using tropical forests as carbon sinks, relevant evidence is sparse. To provide such evidence, our project advances and integrates two disciplinary analyses, and applies them for a case study of Costa Rica. First, we estimate how much C sequestration will be generated in response to any given monetary reward for C sequestration. This estimate is based on our extension (including through excellent GIS databases) of the frontier of economic, observationally-based modeling of land use, integrated with our extension (including through systematic measurement of aboveground and soil C) of both process-based and empirically-based ecological models of C storage. This estimate provides the information for a C "baseline" that would be necessary for any C market. Second, we perform sensitivity analyses on whether simplified versions of our integrated model (which are easier to use within policy) can maintain sufficient accuracy