https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3364-1491
Abstract
The Nationally Determined Contribution architecture of the Paris Agreement has laid the foundation for adopting jurisdictional approaches to governing climate solutions, including those in the forest sector. Meanwhile, the underwhelming aggregate progress and the questionable practices of the voluntary carbon markets call for the nesting of local projects into jurisdictional programs. The objective of this paper is to present our perspective on the comparative performances of the jurisdictional and project-based approaches. Drawing upon the recent developments in the design and execution of climate policy and the theory of political economy, we examine the distinctions between and advantages of the alternative approaches. We show that a jurisdictional approach makes it more feasible for the carbon accounting principles to be followed and the safeguards for emission reduction and removal enforced. Also, jurisdictions tend to have stronger capabilities of measurement, reporting, and verification in carrying out their commitments, and jurisdictional approaches can alleviate the entry barriers and high transaction costs. These advantages can lead to a greater likelihood for countries to accomplish their climate ambitions. In contrast, while individual projects reflect bottom-up initiatives and linkages to local interest and indigenous participation, their weaknesses, such as the limited capacity and coordination and the lack of accountability, have unraveled. However, jurisdictional approaches face their challenges as well, as they may be insufficiently transparent or flexible, or subject to corruption and political turnover. Therefore, we also deliberate how to carry out jurisdictional approaches effectively while avoiding their shortcomings to contribute to an accelerated implementation of nature-based climate solutions.
Citation: Huo J, Wang B, Yin R (2026) A comparative assessment of alternative approaches to governing forest sector climate actions. PLOS Clim 5(3): e0000851. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000851
Editor: Philippe Delacote, INRAE, FRANCE
Published: March 6, 2026
Copyright: © 2026 Huo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
1. Introduction
The Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) architecture of the Paris Agreement underpins jurisdictional approaches to climate governance—making and executing pledges of mitigation and adaptation, including actions in the forest sector, by a national authority, or Party, with the obligations of subordinate bodies to be nested within the national pledge [1,2]. Meanwhile, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its supreme governing body, the Conference of Parties, track the progress that a Party has made and assess the extent to which the collective commitments pledged by all the Parties will meet the global temperature targets (UNFCCC 2020).
In comparison, afforestation, reforestation, and other offsetting actions under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) are explicitly project oriented. That is, they are undertaken through individual, local projects that may not have the necessary commitment, planning, and/or supervision by a jurisdictional authority [3]. Similarly, the recent developments of voluntary carbon markets have been largely driven by local projects [1,4]. Indeed, this project orientation has had a significant influence on our current thinking of and approach to the governance of forest sector climate actions, including carbon accounting and offsetting [5,6].
In addition to the difficulty of gaining credibility and accountability [1,7], however, the project-oriented thinking and approach are inconducive and inadequate to fulfilling the potential role that the forest sector is expected to play in solving the global climate crisis [8]. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present a comparative perspective of the alternative approaches to governing forest climate actions, including their distinctions, strengths, and limitations. We will do so by drawing upon the recent experience and lessons in the design and execution of climate policy through the lens of political economy. In view of the limited progress in implementing these actions, we argue that it is imperative for the science and policy communities to confront their governance head-on.
Here, governance is the process of making and enforcing decisions within a business or social organization [9]. A jurisdictional approach to climate governance thus refers to the process whereby a jurisdictional authority makes and enforces decisions regarding climate change mitigation and adaptation for business and social organizations under its purview. Of course, a national authority is the most relevant one to commit to and fulfill the emission reduction and removal (ER&R) targets of any Party, while the responsibilities of subordinate bodies should be nested within the jurisdictional targets and actions, and operated accordingly. Depending on how the concrete institutional arrangements are made in accordance with the socioecological circumstances, jurisdictional governance can be configured in multiple ways [9].
Nesting pertains to how the governments mobilize, coordinate, and supervise subnational, often local and smaller-scale, activities and integrate them with larger national programs to achieve their NDCs while supporting the transition to low-carbon development [10]. As such, nesting entails not just the design and execution of subnational activities but also the identification and verification of their baselines, or reference levels, against which the program (or project) outcomes can be determined [As observed by one of the reviewers, there can be possible divergence between accounting results at the national level (e.g., increased deforestation) and the aggregate results of individual projects (which would show emission reductions). We will come back to this situation later in our closing remarks.] [11,12]. The primary outcome of a forest sector intervention is its carbon additionality—to what extent it reduces emissions from deforestation and forest degradation or increases emission removals from afforestation and reforestation, improved forest management, and forest carbon stock conservation. In the context of advanced economies supporting the tropical, developing countries to pursue these activities, they are frequently referred to as REDD+ [4].
As deliberated herein, jurisdictional approaches to governing forest sector climate actions have certain distinct advantages compared to project-based ones [1,2]. Other than its compatibility with the Pairs Agreement’s NDC architecture, a jurisdictional approach makes it more feasible for the carbon accounting and crediting principles to be followed and the safeguards for ER&R to be enforced. Also, jurisdictions tend to have stronger capabilities of measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) in carrying out their commitments. Furthermore, jurisdictional approaches can be more efficient as the entry barriers for smallholders and the high transaction costs of executing and validating the necessary actions are alleviated over larger spatial or administrative coverage. As such, they will lead to a greater likelihood for Parties to accomplish their climate ambitions [58].
In contrast, while individual forest projects reflect bottom-up initiatives and linkages to local interest and participation, their weaknesses, such as the limited capacity and coordination, and the lack of credibility and accountability, have been unfolding [13,1]. West et al. [14] and Greenfield [15], among others, have showed that most of the existing REDD+ projects were not successful. In fact, these and other projects have been struggling in providing reliable references levels or counterfactuals against which carbon additionalities are accurately determined. To be sure, jurisdictional approaches have their own challenges as well. Among others, they may be insufficiently transparent or flexible, subject to corruption and political turnover, and the lack of broader support and incentives [16,17].
In short, certain principles and practices pertinent to climate governance have not been well articulated or properly carried out in the forest sector, even after a whole decade has passed since the Paris Agreement. Likewise, the distinctions and linkages of alternative approaches to climate governance have rarely been examined. It is thus worthwhile to expand our view and realign our strategies of governing forest climate actions (DeFries et al. 2021, [4]), so that forest nature-based solutions, or NbSs, can be effectively executed at scale [18]. To that end, following a brief description of the background in Section 2, we analyze the differences between project- and jurisdiction-based approaches in Section 3. Then, we assess their comparative strengths in Section 4 and address their challenges in Section 5. Finally, we deliberate the policy and practical implications of our work in section 6. For reader’s knowledge, we have provided a synopsis of the literature on governing forest sector climate actions in the Supplementary Information (S1 Text).
2. A brief background
Adopting the Paris climate targets and implementing the NDC-centered means and measures has made what we learned under the Kyoto Protocol or from the experience of voluntary markets obsolete. For one thing, “[S]ince the Warsaw Framework for REDD+ was adopted in 2013, 60 developing countries have reported activities to reduce deforestation and forest degradation to the UN Climate Change secretariat” [10]. By comparison, 90 percent of the “second generation” NDCs—new or updated ones that were submitted to the UNFCCC by the end of 2020—contain Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) actions [10]. According to relevant estimations (e.g., [8,19]), the LULUCF actions would more than double the ER&R effects of the REDD+ initiative to over ten billion tons of CO2 equivalent a year if they could be properly adopted. Moreover, it is widely accepted that most, if not all, of the LULUCF actions are more effective in terms of both cost and time compared to many other alternatives of ER&R, particularly in such sectors of the economy as energy, manufacturing, and transportation [20], [60]. Thus, forest sector climate actions needed for achieving the Paris climate targets, along with sustainable development, have gone far beyond the scope and significance of the REDD+ initiative.
Meanwhile, it has been a struggle to deliver the international support for REDD+ promised by developed countries. The 2009 pledge to mobilize US$100 billion a year by 2020 in climate financing to developing counties has not been fully or timely delivered [21], and a large portion of those funds (~ US$10–15 billion a year) is supposed to be allocated for the REDD+ and related actions [22]. Also, the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility has supported 47 poor countries in their implementation of the REDD+ projects with an annual budget a few hundred of million dollars [23]. On the other hand, there was an early explosion of non-jurisdictional REDD+ projects in response to the perceived profiting opportunities coupled with the UNFCCC call for “demonstration activities”. As Wunder et al. [24] put, executing conditional payments ran into a supply- and demand-side problem, causing a large discrepancy between REDD+ theory and practice.
For another thing, while active and rapidly evolving, voluntary carbon markets, including transactions in the LULUCF arena, represent a small portion of the existing, let alone the expected, size of world carbon markets [25]. Obviously, this has to do with the fact that it takes time and effort to resolve the challenges entailed in determining their reference levels and thus carbon additionalities [11,26]. The carbon additionality of a forest intervention is also related to its permanence, which refers to whether the benefits of ER&R may be reversed, and leakage avoidance, which is concerned with whether emission reductions in one place are displaced by emissions to another place [13,27]. Without sorting out and adhering to these principles, it is easy for the markets, voluntary or compliant, to go astray and proper practices of accounting and offsetting to become less likely [13,28], causing concerns about the credibility and accountability of forest carbon projects [26].
Moreover, other than a few big bilateral and multilateral assistance agreements, it has been difficult to scale up the results-based payments (RBP) scheme for REDD+ activities [4], and the market price and other incentives for forest carbon offset credits remain weak within the RBP space. Following a peak of 517 MtCO2e in 2021, the trade volume of forest carbon credits in the voluntary markets dropped precipitously to less than one tenth of that amount in 2023 [28]. Despite the plunge in volume in 2023, the average price did rise, but only slightly, to a lackluster ~ $7.0/tCO2. Moreover, while forest carbon credits are traded in the compliance markets, the trade is conducted in only a few national (e.g., New Zealand and China) and subnational (e.g., California and Quebec) jurisdictions, with very low levels of allowed offsets (<8%) [7]. Also, Badgley et al. [29] already unraveled the complexities of quantifying additionality of the forest offset projects covered by the California’s emission trading scheme (ETS).
It is thus urgent to expand our view and realign our strategies of governing forest climate actions considering the changed landscape of climate policy and practice [1,4]. One of the crucial tasks along this direction is to better understand the comparative strengths of alternative approaches to governing the forest sector climate actions as well as their differentiated capabilities and complex linkages. We argue that doing so will go a long way in clarifying the confusion and controversies surrounding the governance of forest sector climate actions and ultimately contributing to the resolution of a major challenge facing the international community in moving its climate agenda forward.
3. Distinctions between alternative governance approaches
There are multiple distinctions between project- based and jurisdictional approaches to governing forest sector climate actions. They are reflected in the baselines, funding mechanisms, and practices of accounting and offsetting. First, different approaches may not have the same kind of baseline or financing mechanism. For an organization engaged in an RBP initiative, the baseline CO2 emission reductions from deforestation and forest degradation or removals through forestation and other actions are the outcomes of the so-called business as usual (BAU) scenarios that must be established and validated before the offsetting credits and payments can be assessed [12,7]. Here, the reference levels are for a given contractual period, often 5–7 years, instead of a single point of time, against which the subsequent emissions and removals are compared, and the additionality determined in conjunction with permanence and leakage avoidance considerations. Any emission (removal) below (above) the corresponding baseline scenario is deemed additional [7,14].
In contrast, for entities that undertake non-RBP actions in the forest sector, all of them are counted in reference to the same base year—total ER&R in that designated year are subtracted from their counterparts in the future accounting period to find the total additional number of credits or debits resulting from these actions [30]. So, the baseline in this case is different from the counterfactual determined for a REDD+ effort [31]. Moreover, while carbon sequestered and stored by the forest sector under the NDCs may be traded internationally, that is not a prerequisite for non-RBP actions [58]. These actions are carried out by a Party for its own domestic ER&R, with expenses to be covered by revenues from a carbon pricing mechanism, or a combination of public and private finance [32]. Thus, we may expect that these actions will be more likely to be executed as part of a jurisdictional program, rather than in individual projects.
In fact, von Essen and Lambin [2] reported that over the past decade, jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use had attracted increasing attention as an alternative to traditional conservation strategies. Often, these approaches tend to operate within formal administrative boundaries and seek to establish policies and practices that apply to all stakeholders. The authors also highlighted that those jurisdictions they examined amounted to ~40% of global tropical forests, with most undergoing higher-than-average deforestation rates. These findings validate the crux of a REDD+ program that “has a national rather than project scope…, in a way that non-permanence and leakage risks can be consistently and more cost-effectively addressed” [58].
Furthermore, project-based approaches have their intrinsic limitations. A forestation project under the CDM, for instance, must demonstrate that additional effort in terms of financial investment or other resources is necessary for it to be implemented [33]. Participants can select one of the two types of crediting periods: (i) A single fixed crediting period of up to thirty years; (ii) A crediting period of up to twenty years which can be renewed twice. The maximum length of the crediting period for such a project, if successfully renewed twice, can be sixty years [58]. Still, that is hard to claim permanence, and the scale of CDM forestation projects is too small to make a difference [34]. DeFries et al. [1] also observed that a shortcoming of the current project-based carbon market, including those REDD+ ones, is indeed its small-size, piecemeal nature.
In addition, Mehling et al. [35] argued that one promising avenue to incentivize countries to raise climate mitigation ambitions over time is not just to have jurisdictional approaches to climate governance front and center, but also to link different policies such that ER&R in one jurisdiction can be counted toward the commitments of another through trading. Linkage is key because it can reduce the costs of achieving a given ER&R objective. Lower costs, in turn, may contribute politically to embracing more ambitious objectives.
4. Comparative advantages of the alternative approaches
Compatibility with accounting requirements
Confidence in REDD+ and other RBP projects and offsetting credits hinges mainly on how to ensure permanence and additionality. One common method to address these concerns is to install buffer reserves—each project contributes a share of the credits achieved, which works as risk insurance [36]. Risk comes from anthropogenic (e.g., land degradation or conversion) or natural events (e.g., storms, flooding, and fire). Once these events cause sink reversals or stock losses, credits held in the buffer account equivalent to the amount of reversal will be permanently canceled. In Australia, carbon farming associated with the government’s land-based strategies for climate mitigation follows a mix of restrictions that combine buffer reserves with discount elements: farmers that would receive credits in a 100-year permanence scenario would receive 20% fewer credits if they commit to 25-year stable conditions only; the discount comes on top of the 5% buffer amount [1]. Similarly, the California ETS has a formula for quantifying the offset risks, which fall in the range of 9–16% [37]. But these hurdles, coupled with the low market prices, have caused the incentives for generating forest offsetting credits to remain disappointedly low.
As illuminated by DeFries et al. [1], “at the project level, additionality is compromised when voluntary participation in response to an economic incentive is biased toward land users who already intended to change practices.” However, this adverse selection problem diminishes as actors are grouped within larger jurisdictions, as consistent standards and adjustments in the structure predefined by crediting agencies could reduce the problem at the jurisdictional level [38]. A large, jurisdictional-scale carbon stock can thus buffer events that might occur at the project level [39]. In other words, once an ER&R action is covered under the NDC, the non-permanence issue in a specific project is resolved in an aggregate accounting system, and jurisdictional support for low-carbon land management enables even small land users to participate.
Accountability of actions
Adopting jurisdictional approaches is also a recognition of the vital role that governments must play in ER&R [16]. These approaches offer opportunities for experimentation and policy innovation, including various forms of nesting between different participants and partnerships with supply chain actors and indigenous communities [18]. It is central for the policy dialogue to reflect this reality. Oldfield et al. [18] further stated that “these approaches also rely on administration by a public or private organization that would set criteria for the generation and independent verification of credits, to which protocols and project developers must adhere.”
Moreover, jurisdictional funding represents an important turning point in carbon financing [25]. This is because until recently, most forest sector RBP finance has involved market-based funding, while the designated public-sector funding has been funneled to project readiness efforts [23]. As the international community moves beyond REDD+ and scales up forest sector climate actions, however, more financial support from public agencies and non-market sources becomes crucial [3]. In this regard, an example is the Chinese government’s recent spending on clean energy and related innovation, including actions in the forest sector [32]. Furthermore, jurisdictional funding opens new venues for “nesting” and “hybridizing” market-based alternatives as well [40].
Indispensable capabilities
While REDD+ was conceived as a national mechanism, most of the early activity has been carried out through individual projects. Unsurprisingly, these projects have run into the expected difficulties in meeting accounting requirements, assuring buyer confidence, and securing local rights. To operationalize REDD +, countries must develop broad support systems, including a National REDD+ Strategy (or Action Plan), a National Forest Monitoring System, Forest Reference Emission Levels or Forest Reference Level, and a Safeguards Information System [58]. These tasks applies to any non-REDD+ forest sector climate actions as well. Regardless, only competent national (or subnational) authorities can fulfill them, whereas local or project-level authorities rarely possess this capacity.
To illustrate, consider the forest inventories necessary for any forest carbon accounting. Subnational inventory systems are uncommon and, where they exist, their reliability may be questioned, thereby diminishing their accessibility and accuracy for scaling up REDD+ and other project-based initiatives. Meanwhile, most countries already conduct national forest inventories (NFIs). The network of local sites common to NFIs includes monitoring across regional differences, thereby reducing uncertainty at the field level and providing a suite of measurements that allows out-of-sample model validation [18]. For instance, many countries improved their NFIs with new data and enhanced monitoring in support of the 2020 Global Forest Assessment [FAO 2020]. But the data necessary for carbon monitoring are a work in process as coverage and quality remain poor for several variables. In fact, most Parties still report biomass and carbon using default factors such as species composition and stock density [31].
In short, the essential scaling up for carbon offsetting and accounting is still developing, even at the national level. NFIs do, however, provide a technical base that ensures consistency across projects, regions, and administrative units within a country and, thereby, also improves transparency and assure coherency in dealing with international agencies [FAO 2020]. Finally, the national agencies responsible for NFIs have more experience with the unique characteristics of forests for ER&R ([59], [41]). All of this would become more difficult at the project or local level where the organizational and data capacity is much more limited. At the same time, we ought to recognize that due to their lack of capability and competency, certain “fragile states” will inevitably fail to reduce their deforestation or improve their forest conditions [42], even if international funding and thus economic incentives are put in place. However, we should also recognize that the unequal capability of different national jurisdictions is a fact the global community must face up and thus it makes sense to build capacity wherever necessary.
Entry and cost barriers
These barriers can be an unsurmountable financial burden for smaller participants and for more local projects. For example, family forest landowners in the U.S. own, on average, 67.2 acres of forestland. The costs for them to satisfy the requirements for offset project accounting, inventory and monitoring, and permanence assurance are simply too great. Project development and verification costs are high as well, more than $100,000 and $45,000, respectively. At least 1,500–5,000 acres, well in excess of the holdings of most small forestland owners, are needed to balance these costs for participation in the offset market [43]. It is thus not surprising that the average size of existing forestry carbon offset programs in the U.S. is a much larger 22,240 acres. Gu et al. [44] drew a similar conclusion from the experience of two counties in China’s Zhejiang Province. The project development and overhead costs were 1.9 million CNY for the Suichang Carbon Project (8,636 ha) and 1.8 million CNY for the Anji Carbon Project (1,426 ha). (The exchange rate back then was 1 USD = 6.5 CNY.) Included were fees for design and documentation of the management plan, for review and approval, and for monitoring and reporting, certification, and project overhead. They were too large, even when shared by many small participants; as a result, the county governments had to assume them.
National and regional jurisdictions could also reduce the transaction costs in a different way—with credit and access to inputs for land users. Many countries already have public programs for small forest landowners, including free distribution of seedlings and financial incentives for early forest management as well as subsequent technical assistance and firefighting [45]. These programs could be linked with regulations within jurisdictions against deforestation and for protection against fire and other natural disasters. In executing the federal Plan to Prevent and Control Amazon Deforestation, for example, municipality-level initiatives in Brazil successfully reduced deforestation by linking credit to farmers with lower deforestation [4].
Small-scale farmers, constituting 84% of all farmers globally, are at a disadvantage to participate in current carbon markets. A carbon market that purchases offsets from land users in jurisdictions that promote low-carbon land management could help address the disincentives to potential suppliers from high transaction costs. Jurisdictional approaches can also alleviate the concern with proliferated technical needs—especially for MRV and accountability, which have created a host of intermediaries and consultants [1]. Alleviating the costs of engaging this level of sophisticated expertise reduces or even remove barriers to entry for smallholders and projects that are led by indigenous peoples and local communities.
5. Potential challenges
The discussion to this point may suggest a preference for jurisdictional approaches. However, jurisdictional approaches are not well developed at this time and there are reasons for this—substantial hurdles to overcome. Policymakers, practitioners, and analysts know the weaknesses of jurisdictional approaches: political turnover, limited public sector capacity, and the lack of broader support and incentives, each of which can hamper the kind of long-term, sustained attention that forest sector initiatives require to succeed in their climate goal [24]. Jurisdictional approaches also face difficulty in places with rampant corruption and weak enforcement [1].
Moreover, coordination across large areas can be challenging, and leakage may still occur across neighboring jurisdictions [46]. These are tough problems to be addressed through market mechanisms alone. Therefore, an internal disaggregation and sharing of commitments must be worked out for subnational activities, allowing for reference levels to be identified and adjusted, double counting avoided, and collective actions effectuated [47]. Also, fair and equitable benefit and cost sharing is an obligation that is clear to all local and national governments ([58], [48]). It is a particular problem for the forest sector as land rights and governance are deeply political. They involve entrenched power dynamics [4], and it is indeed unrealistic to expect that the market or a jurisdictional approach can easily resolve centuries-old problems of insecure land rights and procedural injustice [1].
In addition, some scholars expressed the concern that the government would employ REDD+ as means to further centralize control [49] or to engage in strategic behavior [50]. While possible, recentralization should not be confused with the acute need for jurisdictional authorities to assume their responsibilities of ER&R. This suggests that national strategies must combine national coordination and policy cohesion with meaningful local involvement in implementation to overcome these and other problems [4]. Boyd et al. [16] and Seymour et al. [17] deliberated the relevant experiences and lessons. As to engaging in strategic behavior by jurisdictional actors, we think that while it is likely for them to manipulate “the rules of the game” as reflected in selecting reference and crediting periods and thus setting the baseline and determining the carbon additionality. This likelihood, nonetheless, should not be greater, or may even be smaller, than that of non-jurisdictional actors. Also, one crucial step in countering any strategic behavior is to have “the rules of the game” properly set and transparently enforced [9].
As another measure toward the goal of reducing injustice, credit buyers on a carbon market could insist on the enforcement of strong and verified safeguards, principles of informed consent, and fair benefit sharing. The international consensus on safeguards is that in addition to addressing the risks of reversals and reducing displacement of emissions, they should (1) complement or be consistent with the objectives of national forest programs and relevant international conventions and agreements; (2) support transparent and effective national forest governance structures; (3) respect for the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples and members of local communities and ensure effective participation of stakeholders; and (4) be compatible with the conservation of natural forests and biological diversity [58]. Yet, even when these safeguards are in place, they are not a guarantee against unfair and inequitable practices, particularly where governments control forest lands that local people use customarily [51,52].
6. Implications for policy and practice
The long-term temperature targets of the Paris Agreement require forest-based actions of mitigation, which hold a significant potential of ER&R [19,60]. To realize this potential, however, it is paramount to solve how to govern these actions appropriately and adequately; and the underwhelming impact and dubious practices thus far have heightened the urgency to address this question now. Through the lens of political economy, this paper has presented our perspective on the comparative performances, as well as the essential linkages, of the two fundamental types of alternative approaches—project-based and broader jurisdictional—to governing forest sector climate actions.
At this time, there is more experience with REDD+ and other project-based actions. Each independent project accounts for its own carbon mitigating effect, which is difficult and costly to do in practice. Accurate accounting and offsetting across multiple projects within a large region or country requires broader efforts to ensure additionality and to deal with the impermanent outcomes of time-limited projects. This implies certain higher and more central organization and coordination among project developer, implementers, and certifiers, or a jurisdictional approach.
A jurisdictional approach begins with the higher level authority, a central (or regional) government agency that establishes targets, principles, standards, and protocols for all forest-based mitigation within it. This approach must account for the independence of specific projects, but its uniform principles, standards, and protocols have clear advantage in their effectiveness and efficiency of delivering the ER&R responsibilities while controlling overall risk and cost through better-developed infrastructure for MRV and baselines, consistent accounting, and market integrity [1,53]. This type of approaches is also consistent with the nature of climate as a global public good which, as such, calls for broad, effective, and substantive participation of the entire global society [54].
Meanwhile, the nesting and integration of all stakeholders within a jurisdiction reflects the subsidiarity principle of economics [54]. That is, from the international viewpoint, it is more appropriate to focus on how national jurisdictions carry out the targets specified in their NDCs; in turn, subnational and local actions should be left to national and/or regional authorities to deal with. Accordingly, the international financial payments should be based on the carbon accounting outcome of jurisdictional actions, and the jurisdictional authority will then allocate the received funds to subordinate organizations and/or projects. So, the possibility of diverging accounting result at the jurisdictional level from the aggregate outcome of individual projects should be small, and any such divergence would be reconciled internally by the jurisdictional authority in consultation with its subordinate organizations and project developers and others.
Clearly, jurisdictions can and should operate with broad collaboration, including any self-organizing system comprised of multiple actors, business and social organizations, and decision-making venues, that recognizes the linkages between these elements [9]. In fact, most government forestry agencies worldwide do include their diverse publics as participants within their decision making, and their inclusion is often a formal legal or administrative mandate regarding information sharing, cost saving, and effectiveness enhancement of final decisions, beside acknowledging the shared benefits.
Incorporating the operations of carbon markets is another issue. Voluntary markets have been murky, chaotic, and even speculative [15,55]. National (and capable subnational) authorities will have to develop a more feasible regulatory framework and standards in which healthy carbon markets, voluntary or compliant, can flourish and be trusted. One critical step in this regard is to identify and verify the program (project) baselines by working with the relevant participants, which is predicated on an accurate establishment of historical ER&R trend lines [31,43]. Notably, none of this prevents businesses and other organizations, many of whom have made net-zero pledges, from working with local communities and other entities on individual forest carbon projects. These arrangements, however, must be coordinated, documented, and supervised by regional or national authorities to ensure the vitality and robustness of their performance [53]. Otherwise, third-party auditing or verification alone may not lead to the integrity required for forest carbon credits [56], and it is unnecessary and even unrealistic to treat jurisdictional and project-oriented governance approaches as mutually exclusive ones.
Finally, it should be acknowledged that because of the limited empirical inquiry thus far, our study has not been able to provide sufficient evidence in support of some of our statements over the comparative advantages and intrinsic challenges of alternative governance approaches. Going forward, this situation must be improved.
Acknowledgments
AcknowledgmentsThe authors appreciate the comments, suggestions, and encouragements made by the reviewers and editors, as well as many of their colleagues and students in the U.S., Canada, and China, most notably Bill Hyde, Shashi Kant, Ying Lin, and Wei Xie. Runsheng is grateful for financial support from the AgBioResearch of Michigan State University.
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