Mitigation Analysis

Mitigation Scenarios

The results of carbon storage densities and associated costs of the case studies are used to determine the amount of carbon that might be stored in the country through the implementation of similar forestry options under two different scenarios: a technical potential scenario and a constrained scenario. In both cases, the analysis of mitigation options includes two broad categories of feasible sustainable forestry practices that can produce not only economic, social, and environmental benefits but can also produce carbon benefits by conserving and sequestering carbon. These two categories are: (1) management of existing forests to avoid or reduce carbon emissions; and (2) management for expanding forest cover and thus carbon storage in the country.

We thus try to demonstrate Venezuela«s physical and technical potential for reducing net carbon emissions based on forest management options, and we exclude the influence that other factors may have on the actual applicability of these management options. The following mitigation options are included: forest protection, forest management in small areas, forest management in large areas, small scale forest plantations, industrial plantations, and agroforestry systems.

The technical scenario is based on estimates of the amount of land technically suitable for the development of mitigation options, without considering socioeconomic, legal, and other limitations. However, the potential land areas that could theoretically be fully allocated for mitigation options development were adjusted in order to avoid overestimation of carbon sequestration potential. Consequently, the results of this scenario might be considered a rather conservative upper limit to the amount of potential carbon storage through the adoption of proposed options. In this scenario, the mitigation analysis was carried out only for year 2025.

Estimates of available land for each mitigation options relied mainly on i) some studies that have characterized potential land use of the country, based only on physical parameters (MARNR, 1982, and 1991), and ii) on assumptions made on the amount of lands that could be allocated for mitigation options development, based mainly on technical considerations. For the options that deal with forest protection and management, potentially available areas were also analyzed within the context of the baseline scenario in order to assess the amount of forest that could be subject to sustainable management practices. Thus the total amount of land potentially available for mitigation options implementation has been estimated to be about 19.7 million hectares while total carbon storage reaches 1,437 MtC (Table IV.8). Based on the results of average unit mitigation costs from the two case studies, total investment cost for this scenario has been estimated to be about US$ 13.7 billion.

The constrained scenario tries to provide a more realistic picture of the country«s potential to store carbon, since, as acknowledge in the literature, socioeconomic factors may limit the actual availability of land for the purpose of storing carbon (Sathaye and Meyers, 1995). However, given the difficulties in assessing the influence of economic, institutional, legal, demographic, and cultural factors on present and future land-use decisions, estimates of the land area that could actually be allocated for each mitigation option was based mainly on rough projections of a feasible development of the forestry sector in Venezuela by 2025. Thus the total land area in this scenario (Table IV.9) represents less than 50% (about 9 million ha) of the total suitable land estimated in the technical scenario. Total carbon storage in this mitigation scenario reaches 695 MtC by 2025 (Table IV.10). Based on the results of average unit mitigation costs from the two case studies, total investment cost for this scenario has been estimated to be about US$ 5.7 billion.

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