Efficient, Sustainable, and Multifunctional Carbon Offsetting to Boost Forest Management: A Comparative Case Study

Abstract

Research highlights: Funding forest management with subsidies from carbon offsetters is a well-documented mechanism in tropical regions. This article provides complementary insights into the use of voluntary offset contracts in temperate forests. Background and objectives: The mitigation of greenhouse emissions has become a major global issue, leading to changes in forest management to increase the capacity of forests to store carbon. This can lead to conflicts of use with other forest ecosystem services such as timber production or biodiversity conservation. Our main goal is to describe collective actions to fund carbon-oriented forestry with subsidies from carbon offsetters and to analyze how their governance and functioning prevent conflicts pertaining to multi-functionality. Materials and methods: We assembled an interdisciplinary research team comprising two ecologists, a social scientist, and an economist. Drawing on a conceptual framework of ecosystem services, social interdependencies, and collective action, we based our qualitative analysis on semi-structured interviews from two French case studies. Results: Carbon-oriented intermediary forest organizations offer offset contracts to private firms and public bodies. Communication is geared toward the mitigation outcomes of the contracts as well as their beneficial side effects in providing the ecosystem services of interest to the offsetters. Subsidies then act as a financial lever to fund carbon-oriented forestry operations. Scientific committees and reporting methodologies serve as environmental, social, and economic safeguards. Conclusions: These new intermediary forest organizations use efficient forest operations and evaluation methodologies to improve forest carbon storage. Their main innovation lies in their collective governance rooted in regional forest social-ecological systems. Their consideration of multi-functionality and socioeconomic issues can be seen as an obstacle to rapid development, but they ensure sustainability and avoid conflicts between producers and beneficiaries of forest ecosystem services. Attention must be paid to interactions with broader spatial and temporal carbon policies.

Unravelling the Role of Institutions in Market-Based Instruments: A Systematic Review on Forest Carbon Mechanisms

“…It is worth mentioning that forestry offsets have not been included in the EU ETS, but EU is taking steps to bring forestry into carbon market. Offset schemes can also be used with PES schemes, i.e., carbon offset contracts were given to forest landowners in a region in France to support carbon-oriented forest operations [49].…”

Forest Management, Conflict and Social-Ecological Systems in a Changing World

“…Fouqueray and colleagues [27] analyze an ongoing strategy in French forests that provides subsidies for management programs seeking to increase carbon sequestration. As this strategy can be interpreted as promoting homogeneous, low diversity, low quality managed forests, the analyzed programs have a social-ecological approach, in which consensus is sought with local partners to avoid conflicts before the programs are de-ployed.…”

“…Various contributing papers account for the impact of telecoupling that is represented in topdown policies, such as the European Union targets for greener energy [28], REDD+ programs [29], and carbon credits [26,27], highlighting the vertical dimension of conflict origin, as depicted in Figure 1.…”

Forest Management, Conflict and Social–Ecological Systems in a Changing World

“…Fouqueray and colleagues [27] analyze an ongoing strategy in French forests that provides subsidies for management programs seeking to increase carbon sequestration. As this strategy can be interpreted as promoting homogeneous, low diversity, low quality managed forests, the analyzed programs have a social-ecological approach, in which consensus is sought with local partners to avoid conflicts before the programs are deployed.…”

“…Various contributing papers account for the impact of telecoupling that is represented in top-down policies, such as the European Union targets for greener energy [28], REDD+ programs [29], and carbon credits [26,27], highlighting the vertical dimension of conflict origin, as depicted in Figure 1.…”