"If you own a forest that stores carbon, you can sell ‘credits’ representing the carbon that you're storing for cash on the market," Ashwin Ravikumar of The Field Museum, US, told environmentalresearchweb. "In principle, this should help support conservation because if you own a forest and stand to make money by cutting it down and planting a valuable crop like soy or oil palm, you could now instead keep your forest standing but still make money from the carbon market."

The trouble, according to Ravikumar, is that it's not always obvious how much carbon can be stored in the forests of developing countries where aggressive conservation actions are taken, compared to what might be lost if the forests are cut down.

The UN REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) initiative has chiefly focused on funding from carbon markets.

"How much of, say, the Peruvian Amazon might realistically be cut down in the next 20 years?" said Ravikumar. "If you are interested in estimating how much money might be expected from these carbon markets, it's important to figure this out."

With that in mind, Ravikumar and colleagues organized workshops for indigenous farmers, conservationists, private firms and government employees from sectors such as environment, forestry, mining and agriculture in Indonesia, Peru, Tanzania and Mexico.

"We decided that the best way to figure out what's really likely to happen in these diverse landscapes would be to get many different types of local experts into a room together to systematically game out what types of future land-use changes are conceivable," said Ravikumar. "How much forest can we lose? How much might we conserve? And what are the political, social, environmental and economic factors that might lead us to each of these different futures?"

Each group generated future scenarios of land use for two landscapes, taking into account factors such as population growth, migration and commodity prices. The researchers then used the CarboScen tool to assess the landscape carbon storage of the resulting scenarios.

The most striking finding from the workshops, Ravikumar said, was how much variation there was in the amount of carbon forests in different landscapes could lock up. This was the first time this variation had been concretely linked to an analysis of future scenarios of land use.

The workshops also revealed that the amount of money expected from carbon markets may look big if you're thinking about a government programme, or funding for a protected area, but small if you want to deliver cash directly to millions of households. "In other words…there's lots of variation in how much carbon can be stored in landscapes, and how much revenue can be expected from carbon markets, but we found perhaps even more variation in peoples' ideas about how those funds might be distributed and used," said Ravikumar.

For example, the roughly 897,000 citizens of Unguja island in the Zanzibar archipelago would receive $42 each from the landscape over 30 years. The estimated income of just over $38 million could, however, be meaningful when added to the government of Zanzibar’s roughly $300 million annual budget.

Landscape in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan, meanwhile, could earn $3.5 billion over 30 years. This would equate to $1000 for each person living in the province over this timeframe.

Even if they aren’t likely to generate much revenue from carbon markets and offsets, all the landscapes studied have impressive biodiversity, provide ecosystem services and support the well-being of communities who live near them, according to the team.

"They are absolutely worth conserving and protecting," said Ravikumar. "At the same time, if we can't realistically expect carbon markets to fund conservation in these landscapes, we need to think creatively about other options, and other ways to advocate for their conservation. Crucially, local people need to be part of the decision-making process, and any outside agency that intervenes in these landscapes must provide realistic information about different options and alternatives."

Ravikumar is now seeking to identify "concrete levers of political action that scientists, citizens, policy makers and local communities can pull" to support conservation alongside human well-being, regardless of how many tonnes of carbon are stored in their particular landscape.

"At the end of the day, reducing deforestation and fighting climate change is a political process," he said. "While it's important to use rigorous science to tell us how different decisions that affect forests on the ground might have implications for issues like climate change, it's even more important to understand who really makes those decisions and how those decisions are made."

Ravikumar and colleagues reported their work in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).

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