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

Andrea Baranzini, Nicolas Borzykowski and Stefano Carattini

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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.

Keywords: forest policy; climate policy; carbon offsets; reforestation; acceptability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q23 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-ppm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published in Journal of Forest Economics, 1, August, 2018, 32, pp. 1-12. ISSN: 1104-6899

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Journal Article: Carbon offsets out of the woods? Acceptability of domestic vs. international reforestation programmes in the lab (2018)
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