Climatic Change http://doi.org/h25 (2012)

REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a mitigation strategy designed to reward countries for reducing deforestation and forest degradation through financial benefit. Although the potential of REDD policies has been widely discussed, the implication of uncertainties and costs involved in estimating forest carbon stock changes are less well explored.

Daniel Plugge from the Institute for World Forestry, University of Hamburg, Germany and co-workers conducted a simulation study for a set of countries that exhibit a range of deforestation rates in order to investigate the influence of carbon estimation costs and uncertainties on REDD policy efficacy in these situations.

Their experiments indicate that the potential to generate benefits from REDD is highly dependant on the magnitude of the total error, whereas assessment costs and the price of carbon credits were found to play only a minor role. Consequently, total errors under current monitoring systems are only sufficient to gain revenues from REDD-regimes under high deforestation rates, and the authors argue that REDD is therefore not currently a useful policy tool in countries with low deforestation rates.