I’m pleased to see more work on REDD+, so thank you for your efforts here. I’d agree that among the “offset-esque” options, REDD+ is relatively promising.
I think this report understates the risks of PES. I’m willing to believe that PES generated real deforestation benefits when it came to the Jayachandran et al study. However there are some questions about generalisability. Successful implementation of PES requires effective land rights, effective monitoring, reporting and validation, and can be stymied by corruption (several sources have made this point, see e.g. CIFOR). Also I think that readers of this report may believe that all REDD+ interventions are PES, but that’s not the case—several other interventions are also used, including export taxes and regulation of land use. I.e. governments may well be using interventions which have an even weaker evidence base than PES (which might be sensible because of the concerns that I outlined about PES). I think this shows that it’s really hard to implement REDD+ well—some countries do appear to have achieved results, but continued success in this area is not guaranteed.
Additionality/reference levels—did you account for the return of Lula? I liked your observations about the reference levels—we too share these concerns. I’m sorry if I missed it in your piece, but I would have liked more detail on why you concluded that a range as high as 60%-100% was additional, especially given that the return of Lula in Brazil would likely be good news for forests anyway (even without REDD+).
You seem more confident than I am that leakage will be solved by jurisdictional REDD+. There are multiple ways that suppressing deforestation in one place can cause more deforestation to “leak”/displace to other areas. Even if some RCTs/studies do find that within-community leakage/displacement did not occur, leakage may still have happened. For example, when we looked into Cool Earth, we learned that the people who chop down trees often travel from some distance, e.g. in Peru they may have come from the Andean region, and elsewhere they tend to be large multinational companies. To the extent that deforestation is caused by a large multinational company, it seems that some sort of REDD+ would need to be implemented pretty much everywhere, which seems a tall order.
Failing to continue PES payments is not the only threat to permanence. Risks include political risks, or risks to REDD+ itself. As we highlighted in our report on CfRN (the organisation which administers REDD+), there are risks to the REDD+ scheme itself—some countries have expressed concern that they have received only a fraction of the funds promised to them under REDD+. I’m unsure how much those concerns are reduced after Lula’s win in Brazil.
We haven’t built a cost-effectiveness model for REDD+ yet (and it may be some time before we do), however I predict ours might end up with numbers that are somewhat less favourable than yours.
I should also add that it’s easy in comments like the one I’m writing to focus on areas of disagreement; I’m sorry if it makes the tone of my comment sound negative! I do think there are lots of useful and valid contributions in this report. Also, although I read through most of this, I didn’t carefully read all of it, so it’s possible that I’ve missed some things.
Thanks, Sanjay. Generalizability is indeed crucial, and we discuss the conditions for success of jurisdictional REDD+ (JR+ hereafter), including things like effective political incentives to avoid issues around property rights and corruption (see subsection “Political leaders need incentives to follow through”), as well as the need for effective MRV (see section “REDD+ measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) standards are thorough but not yet sufficient to adequately account for forest degradation”), though we acknowledge that there is much additional research that could be done to understand these issues across various contexts. We (like the experts with whom we spoke) see reason for optimism in the recent advances toward JR+, technological advances in improving data collection and improving MRV, and improvements in certification in light of the very issues you mention. We also suggest that funding toward programs that aim to improve the likelihood of JR+ success along these dimensions could be worth researching, though we did not ourselves explore any such programs.
As mentioned in the response to Johannes, we conducted most of this research in the beginning of 2022 (i.e. many months before the Brazilian election). However, the lowest-cost opportunities according to the WEF and McKinsey (2021) report, on which we rely heavily for our CE estimates, are not in Brazil, so we imagine the change in the political landscape would not substantively change our general stance that JR+ appears cost-effective and there is RFMF to get it off the ground. The return of Lula may actually improve the prospects for JR+, given the difficulty of achieving its ends without political buy-in.
Indeed, we also make the point that efforts to expand the coverage of JR+ are crucial for preventing leakage. And we did not come across much in the way of countries threatening to abandon REDD+ due to lack of prompt payment in our research, though we would definitely be interested to hear more about this if you have some sources you could share, and we agree that Lula’s recent election will likely change the political rhetoric in the Brazilian context.
Indeed, we were more pessimistic about REDD+ when we started the research for many of the reasons that you and others have expressed skepticism, and rightfully. We hope the report adequately justifies our own stance. And of course, we are very open to comparing CE models and outcomes—please reach out if you do build such a CEA!
I’m pleased to see more work on REDD+, so thank you for your efforts here. I’d agree that among the “offset-esque” options, REDD+ is relatively promising.
I think this report understates the risks of PES. I’m willing to believe that PES generated real deforestation benefits when it came to the Jayachandran et al study. However there are some questions about generalisability. Successful implementation of PES requires effective land rights, effective monitoring, reporting and validation, and can be stymied by corruption (several sources have made this point, see e.g. CIFOR). Also I think that readers of this report may believe that all REDD+ interventions are PES, but that’s not the case—several other interventions are also used, including export taxes and regulation of land use. I.e. governments may well be using interventions which have an even weaker evidence base than PES (which might be sensible because of the concerns that I outlined about PES). I think this shows that it’s really hard to implement REDD+ well—some countries do appear to have achieved results, but continued success in this area is not guaranteed.
Additionality/reference levels—did you account for the return of Lula? I liked your observations about the reference levels—we too share these concerns. I’m sorry if I missed it in your piece, but I would have liked more detail on why you concluded that a range as high as 60%-100% was additional, especially given that the return of Lula in Brazil would likely be good news for forests anyway (even without REDD+).
You seem more confident than I am that leakage will be solved by jurisdictional REDD+. There are multiple ways that suppressing deforestation in one place can cause more deforestation to “leak”/displace to other areas. Even if some RCTs/studies do find that within-community leakage/displacement did not occur, leakage may still have happened. For example, when we looked into Cool Earth, we learned that the people who chop down trees often travel from some distance, e.g. in Peru they may have come from the Andean region, and elsewhere they tend to be large multinational companies. To the extent that deforestation is caused by a large multinational company, it seems that some sort of REDD+ would need to be implemented pretty much everywhere, which seems a tall order.
Failing to continue PES payments is not the only threat to permanence. Risks include political risks, or risks to REDD+ itself. As we highlighted in our report on CfRN (the organisation which administers REDD+), there are risks to the REDD+ scheme itself—some countries have expressed concern that they have received only a fraction of the funds promised to them under REDD+. I’m unsure how much those concerns are reduced after Lula’s win in Brazil.
We haven’t built a cost-effectiveness model for REDD+ yet (and it may be some time before we do), however I predict ours might end up with numbers that are somewhat less favourable than yours.
I should also add that it’s easy in comments like the one I’m writing to focus on areas of disagreement; I’m sorry if it makes the tone of my comment sound negative! I do think there are lots of useful and valid contributions in this report. Also, although I read through most of this, I didn’t carefully read all of it, so it’s possible that I’ve missed some things.
Thanks, Sanjay. Generalizability is indeed crucial, and we discuss the conditions for success of jurisdictional REDD+ (JR+ hereafter), including things like effective political incentives to avoid issues around property rights and corruption (see subsection “Political leaders need incentives to follow through”), as well as the need for effective MRV (see section “REDD+ measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) standards are thorough but not yet sufficient to adequately account for forest degradation”), though we acknowledge that there is much additional research that could be done to understand these issues across various contexts. We (like the experts with whom we spoke) see reason for optimism in the recent advances toward JR+, technological advances in improving data collection and improving MRV, and improvements in certification in light of the very issues you mention. We also suggest that funding toward programs that aim to improve the likelihood of JR+ success along these dimensions could be worth researching, though we did not ourselves explore any such programs.
As mentioned in the response to Johannes, we conducted most of this research in the beginning of 2022 (i.e. many months before the Brazilian election). However, the lowest-cost opportunities according to the WEF and McKinsey (2021) report, on which we rely heavily for our CE estimates, are not in Brazil, so we imagine the change in the political landscape would not substantively change our general stance that JR+ appears cost-effective and there is RFMF to get it off the ground. The return of Lula may actually improve the prospects for JR+, given the difficulty of achieving its ends without political buy-in.
Indeed, we also make the point that efforts to expand the coverage of JR+ are crucial for preventing leakage. And we did not come across much in the way of countries threatening to abandon REDD+ due to lack of prompt payment in our research, though we would definitely be interested to hear more about this if you have some sources you could share, and we agree that Lula’s recent election will likely change the political rhetoric in the Brazilian context.
Indeed, we were more pessimistic about REDD+ when we started the research for many of the reasons that you and others have expressed skepticism, and rightfully. We hope the report adequately justifies our own stance. And of course, we are very open to comparing CE models and outcomes—please reach out if you do build such a CEA!