Designing REDD+ Schemes to Address Permanence Concerns: Empirical Evidence from Kenya

Summary

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and  Forest  Degradation (REDD+) is an important topic in the debate on policies to mitigate climate change. This is the first study to test and compare the environmental impact of different REDD+ payment schemes in the field, and  provide some insights on the effectiveness of different policies  with respect to  the permanence of forest-based emission reductions. This study implements  a stated preference experiment of time allocation in the unique setting of the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project in Kenya,  where charcoaling is a major source of forest degradation. The impact on  time allocation is analyzed under the presumption that a hypothetical agricultural policy or an ecocharcoaling policy was introduced. We find that a policy that indexes eco-charcoal payments to charcoalers’  opportunity costs is the most effective policy in providing permanence in REDD+: it lowers the amount of labor allocated to charcoaling even at high charcoal prices.