UN’s REDD ROI

I read a BBC story today about Paul Sukhdev, an economist and banker with Deutsche Bank who who was promoting the UN Environment Programme’s program of paying heavily forested countries for NOT logging. The program, called “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), is the UN’s market-based program that issues carbon credits as financial incentive to dissuade forest owners from logging.

The push behind this program is to invest in the most cost-effective methods of curbing carbon emissions globally, which is conservation. (This is eerily similar to and similarly simple as the most cost-effective energy saving measures locally, which come from increased efficiency.)

I am looking for the primary sources of some information referenced by Mr Sukhdev; studies that show money spent on nature preservation provided rates of return of between three and 75 times the initial investment. Seventy-five times!

He’s referring to the side effects of preservation, such as protection of fresh water systems through forest preservation, or protection of coral reefs that provide huge amounts of food for humans worldwide. A great deal of work has gone into calculating the economic impacts of ecosystems and their impacts on human life, but I haven’t found information on the ROI of investing in conservation or environmental protection.

If anyone has information about these or similar economic studies referenced by Mr Sukhdev, please let us know.

Tagged as: carbon credits, forest, logging, roi, UN, wood