Publications by David Cooley
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What Makes Carbon Work? A Sensitivity Analysis of Factors Affecting Forest Offset Viability
March 2012 - by Christopher S. Galik and David M. Cooley
Early implementation experience and a handful of empirical analyses in the literature indicate that the supply of forest carbon offsets may be constrained by, among other factors, transaction costs, access to markets, and carbon accounting rules and regulations. To more fully explore this issue, we use a forest growth and carbon accounting model to assess the relative influence of several key accounting, financial, and market variables on forest carbon offset project viability. We find that project performance, indicated by sequestration rate and project profitability, varies widely across the three project/forest type combinations evaluated here. The effects of carbon price and project length vary in both magnitude and direction from project to project. Project accounting considerations, including baseline establishment method and deductions for “leakage” and other factors, tend to figure prominently in each project, but vary in their absolute effect. These initial results suggest that choice of accounting protocol is a critical decision facing landowners considering forest offset projects. Results also suggest that a one-size-fits-all accounting approach may fail to maximize either landowner participation or the representation of forest types or management systems.
Stacking Ecosystem Services Payments: Risks and Solutions
February 2012
Healthy ecosystems provide many services to society, including water filtration, biodiversity habitat protection, and carbon sequestration. A number of incentive programs and markets have arisen to pay landowners for these services, raising questions about how landowners can receive multiple payments for the ecosystem services they provide from the same parcel, a practice known as stacking. Stacking can provide multiple revenue streams for landowners and encourage them to manage their lands for multiple ecosystem services. However, if not well-managed, it may also lead to a net loss of services.
The Potential Role for Management of U.S. Public Lands in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation and Climate Policy
January 2012
Management of forests, rangelands, and wetlands on public lands, including the restoration of degraded lands, has the potential to increase carbon sequestration or reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions beyond what is occurring today. In this paper we discuss several policy options for increasing GHG mitigation on public lands. These range from an extension of current policy by generating supplemental mitigation on public lands in an effort to meet national emissions reduction goals, to full participation in an offsets market by allowing GHG mitigation on public lands to be sold as offsets either by the overseeing agency or by private contractors. To help place these policy options in context, we briefly review the literature on GHG mitigation and public lands to examine the potential for enhanced mitigation on federal and state public lands in the United States. This potential will be tempered by consideration of the tradeoffs with other uses of public lands, the needs for climate change adaptation, and the effects on other ecosystem services.
Stacking Ecosystem Services Payments: Risks and Solutions
September 2011 - by David Cooley and Lydia Olander
A wide variety of incentive programs and markets have arisen to pay landowners for ecosystem services--the benefits that healthy ecosystems provide, such as water filtration, biodiversity, habitat protection, and carbon sequestration. This raises questions about whether landowners can receive more than one payment for ecosystem services generated from the same parcel of land, a practice known as "stacking." This paper outlines the different types of ecosystem service credits that can be stacked, and introduces a conceptual framework that can help policy makers and project developers determine whether a stacked project is meeting the objective of replacing or enhancing ecosystem services. It also identifies three specific circumstances in which stacking can lead to a negative outcome for ecosystem services and puts forward specific policy proposals to address these issues.
Managing Dependencies in Forest Offset Projects: Toward a More Complete Evaluation of Reversal Risk
July 2011
Although forest carbon offsets can play an important role in the implementation of comprehensive climate policy, they also face an inherent risk of reversal. If such risks are positively correlated across projects, it can affect the integrity of larger project portfolios and potentially the entire offsets program. Here, we discuss three types of risks that could affect forest offsets—fat tails, micro-correlation, and tail dependence—and provide examples of how they could present themselves in a forest offset context. Given these potential dependencies, we suggest several new risk management approaches that take into account dependencies in reversal risk across projects and which could help guard the climate integrity of an offsets program. We also argue that data collection be included as an integral part of any offsets program so that disturbance-related dependencies may be identified and managed as early and to the greatest extent possible.
Carbon Offsets and Environmental Impacts: NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and Federal Climate Policy
April 2011
Carbon offsets have been an integral part of recent climate policy proposals, but there are questions about how a carbon offsets program would interact with existing environmental laws. Laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) require federal agencies to assess the potential impacts their actions would have on the environment. Such assessments can be lengthy and time consuming, and they could delay the establishment of an offsets program or the approval of individual projects. This paper examines how the type of offsets program proposed in recent climate legislation would be affected by the requirements of NEPA and the ESA. The authors suggest a range of policy options that would allow an offsets program to address any potential conflicts with these laws, while still meeting their requirements.
Avoiding the Glorious Mess: A Sensible Approach to Climate Change and the Clean Air Act
October 2010 - by Jonas Monast, Tim Profeta, and David Cooley
In March 2010, the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, the Duke University School of Law, and the Center for Law, the Environment, Adaptation, and Resources (CLEAR) at the University of North Carolina School of Law convened many of the nation’s legal experts on the Clean Air Act for an event in Durham, North Carolina, to examine the options for regulating GHGs under the Act. This report builds upon some of the ideas discussed at that meeting and described in recent publications, with the goal of identifying a viable approach to GHG regulation through the current Clean Air Act in the event that Congress does not act on comprehensive climate legislation.
The Potential Role for Management of Public Lands in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation and Climate Policy
August 2010 - by Lydia Olander, David Cooley, Christopher Galik
Public lands, including federal and state lands, offer significant opportunities for increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation from the management and restoration of forests, rangelands, and wetlands. This paper provides a rough estimate of the potential mitigation opportunities from public lands, including near-term sequestration generated from an elimination of timber harvests in public forests and improving management of some rangelands. It also presents policy options that decision makers and land managers can pursue to increase mitigation on public lands. This is a revised version of a paper that was published in July 2010.
The Role of Public Lands in a Low-Carbon Economy
March 2010 - by Christopher S. Galik, Joseph L. Grinnell, David M. Cooley
Policy Options for Transitioning from Voluntary to Federal Offsets Markets
January 2010 - by Lydia Olander, David Cooley and Brian Murray
Nicholas Institute Discussion Brief on H.R. 2454, S. 1733, and S.2729
The Effects of Performance Standards on Offsets Supply Under H.R. 2454
August 2009 - by David Cooley, Lydia Olander, Brian Murray
Nicholas Institute Discussion Memo on H.R. 2454 American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009
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