The Role of Sustainable Land Management for Climate ... - CAADP

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doubts about the verifiability and permanence of carbon offsets in developing countries,
environmental groups may also prefer to restrict offsets to domestic sources, which may be seen
as more easily verified.
Challenges to REDD payments
There are many challenges to the effective use of REDD payments to mitigate climate change
and benefit countries and poor people in SSA. There will be serious technical difficulties and
costs of defining baselines and measuring and verifying reduced deforestation and forest
degradation. Measurement of changes in forest degradation, as opposed to deforestation (which
can be measured using remote sensing techniques), is likely to be especially difficult.
A particularly thorny problem is the issue of additionality, which hinges on the question
of what level of deforestation would have occurred without the payments. Addressing this issue
is important not only to assure the effectiveness of the payments in reducing GHG emissions, but
also because this determines the level of payments to be made. If a country with a high rate of
past deforestation is paid to reduce future deforestation rates below that level, large payments
could be paid even though no actual reduction in emissions occurred as a result, if the rate of
deforestation would have declined anyway (for example, because of a halt in road building in
forested areas that was planned even without the payments). The hypothetical nature of the
counterfactual situation (what would deforestation have been without the payments) may make
REDD payments seem to be arbitrary and ineffective to many observers.
A related issue is the potential for adverse incentives to be caused by REDD payments.
If payments are made based on changes relative to current or recent deforestation rates (at the
time of treaty implementation), this could create incentives for countries to promote or allow
increased deforestation until the post-Kyoto treaty is ratified and begins to be implemented. This
problem could be addressed by advocating and using a historical baseline that is before the
current date, so that decisions related to deforestation made from now until the new treaty begins
implementation could not affect future REDD payments. However, the longer the time period
between the historical reference period and whenever the future treaty begins to be implemented,
the less likely it is that the reference period will adequately represent what future deforestation
would have been without the payments, especially in rapidly developing (or economically
declining) countries. This problem could be addressed to some extent by predicting future
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