Slowing the reduction, or increasing the accumulation, of organic carbon
stored in biomass and soils has been suggested as a potentially rapid
and cost-effective method to reduce the rate of atmospheric carbon
increase¹.
The costs of mitigating climate change by increasing ecosystem carbon
relative to the baseline or business-as-usual scenario has been
quantified in numerous studies, but results have been contradictory, as
both methodological issues and substance differences cause variability².
Here we show, based on 77 standardized face-to-face interviews of local
experts with the best possible knowledge of local land-use economics
and sociopolitical context in ten landscapes around the globe, that the
estimated cost of increasing ecosystem carbon varied vastly and was
perceived to be 16–27 times cheaper in two Indonesian landscapes
dominated by peatlands compared with the average of the eight other
landscapes. Hence, if reducing emissions from deforestation and forest
degradation (REDD+) and other land-use mitigation efforts are to be
distributed evenly across forested countries, for example, for the sake
of international equity, their overall effectiveness would be
dramatically lower than for a cost-minimizing distribution.