The Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism (MNRT) and UNDP, through
the UN-REDD National Programme, commissioned a study to get an answer to this
question. The final report has now been completed and will be released during
the 14th session of the African Ministerial Conference on the
Environment (AMCEN), which will be held in Arusha, Tanzania, from 7 – 14
September.
The study distinguishes four different kinds of costs that REDD+ projects
incur: opportunity costs, implementation costs, transaction costs and
institutional costs.
Forest economists and other experts from two firms, LTS International
and Germany-based UNIQUE forestry and land use, worked closely with several of
the REDD+ pilot projects in Tanzania as well as representatives from government
and academia and other stakeholders in the REDD+ process to establish the above
costs at the project level. Results show that all cost elements have wide
variations depending on the location of a project, the surrounding land-uses
and the general economic conditions. Project-specific opportunity costsrange
from USD -7.8 to USD 28.8 per tonne of CO2. Combined implementation,
transaction and institutional costs range from USD 3.9 to USD 8.9 per ha and
per year with the largest share, up to 95%, being consumed by implementation
costs.
Figure 1: Opportunity cost curve for three REDD+ pilot projects in
Tanzania:
The project results emphasised the need for establishing project- and
region-specific costs for the development of REDD+ projects in order to
identify the most cost-efficient project locations. Results were presented, for
example, in the form of REDD+ opportunity cost curves (see above). An
opportunity cost curve provides a comparison of the opportunity costs of
different types of land use change. Figure 1 presents this information from the
three pilot projects used in this study, covering a total of around 328,000
hectares of woodland and forests in western, central and southern Tanzania over
a ten-year period. The vertical axis represents the opportunity cost of the
emissions reduction option (in monetary units per tonne of CO2 equivalent),
while the horizontal axis shows the corresponding quantity of reduction
(expressed in million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year). A wide bar indicates
significant potential emission reductions, while a narrow bar indicates the
opposite.
Opportunity cost curves allow project developers and governments to
determine a carbon price that would be required to meet the opportunity cost of
selected land uses in a project location and the total amount of emission
reductions that could be obtained for each land use type.
The project also highlighted the need for REDD+ initiatives to be
integrated with other sectoral investment plans such as in agriculture and
energy to ensure harmonization of activities and to offset high implementation
costs. In the long term, the study concluded, investments in REDD+ need to
result in more sustainable land use systems that address the underlying causes
of deforestation and forest degradation.
The complete study as well as a Policy Brief is now available at the
following location:
A scientific article based on the project findings was published in the
journal Carbon Balance and Management and can be downloaded at the following
link: http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/7/1/9/abstract
A further output of the project was a software tool that REDD+ project
developers as well as any other interested stakeholder can use to monitor and
control the cost of a REDD+ project. During the project, training was provided
to REDD+ pilot project staff and other interested parties in the use and
application of this tool. The tool can be downloaded at:
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