Journal of Forest Economics > Vol 32 > Issue 1

Carbon offsets out of the woods? Acceptability of domestic vs. international reforestation programmes in the lab

Andrea Baranzini, Haute école de gestion de Genève, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland, Nicolas Borzykowski, Haute école de gestion de Genève, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland AND Institute of Economic Research, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, nicolas.borzykowski@hesge.ch , Stefano Carattini, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, United States AND Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom
 
Suggested Citation
Andrea Baranzini, Nicolas Borzykowski and Stefano Carattini (2018), "Carbon offsets out of the woods? Acceptability of domestic vs. international reforestation programmes in the lab", Journal of Forest Economics: Vol. 32: No. 1, pp 1-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jfe.2018.02.004

Publication Date: 0/8/2018
© 0 2018 Andrea Baranzini, Nicolas Borzykowski, Stefano Carattini
 
Subjects
 
Keywords
JEL Codes:Q23Q54Q58
Forest policyClimate policyCarbon offsetsReforestationAcceptability
 

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This is published under the terms of CC-BY.

In this article:
Introduction 
Methodology 
Results 
Conclusion 

Abstract

Following the entry into force of the Paris Agreement in November 2016, governments around the world are now expected to turn their nationally determined contributions into concrete climate policies. Given the global public good nature of climate change mitigation and the important cross-country differences in marginal abatement costs, distributing mitigation efforts across countries could substantially lower the overall cost of implementing climate policy. However, abating emissions abroad instead of domestically may face important political and popular resistance. We ran a lab experiment with more than 300 participants and asked them to choose between a domestic and an international reforestation project. We tested the effect of three informational treatments on the allocation of participants’ endowment between the domestic and the international project. The treatments consisted in: (1) making more salient the cost-effectiveness gains associated with offsetting carbon abroad; (2) providing guarantees on the reliability of reforestation programmes; (3) stressing local ancillary benefits associated with domestic offset projects. We found that stressing the cost-effectiveness of the reforestation programme abroad did increase its support, the economic argument in favour of offsetting abroad being otherwise overlooked by participants. We relate this finding to the recent literature on the drivers of public support for climate policies, generally pointing to a gap between people's preferences and economists’ prescriptions.

DOI:10.1016/j.jfe.2018.02.004