Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change
Open Access

Abstract

In 2015, the international community concluded the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting in the year 2020. And 147 Partieshave ratified the Agreement and 162 Parties have submitted to the UN their first nationally determined contributions (NDCs), including their reduction goals. The Paris Agreement agreed on SDM(Sustainable Development Mechanism), or a new international carbon market mechanism after 2020, cooperative approaches, and non-market-based approaches. In response, most countries are working to achieve their respective NDCs not only by reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions, increasing carbon sinksand using the internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (ITMO). Accordingly, there has been a growing interest in registering a project to increase carbon sinks with the International Market Mechanism and contributing to achievement of NDC by acquiring ITMO.The project to increase carbon sinks is generally composed of forestation & reforestation, forest management and REDD+, of which reforestation is the only project that is recognized as the project to increase carbon sinks in the existing CDM. And REDD+ projects were agreed as a greenhouse gas emission reduction project in Article 5 of the Paris Agreement. However, forest management is recognized as a project to increase carbon sinks only by some programs such as the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).Therefore, this study is going to analyze countries and their relevant plans including ITMO and the project to increase carbon sinks by analyzing the NDCs of 147 countries. Then, it will make a comparative analysis on whether an emission trading scheme or a carbon offset scheme for each country recognizes emissions about the project to increase carbon sinks. Based on the results of the analysis, this study is going to analyze the potential for acquiring carbon emissions of the project to increase carbon sinks in the new climate regime, and suggest a plan to activate the project.

Biography

Eunhee Choi has her expertise in Environmental Engineering under Climate Change. Since 2005 she has been the researcher at Rural Research Institute(RRI), Korea Rural Community and Corporation(KRC). Her main Research theme in RRI: Policy and model development related to biomass utilization and greenhousegas reduction. In these days researching on forestry carbon emission under the post-2020.