9.6 Effectiveness of and experience with policies

This section examines the barriers, opportunities, and implementation issues associated with policies affecting mitigation in the forestry sector. Non-climate policies, that is forest sector policies that affect net greenhouse gas emissions from forests, but that are not designed primarily to achieve climate objectives, as well as policies primarily designed to reduce net forest emissions are considered. Many factors influence the efficacy of forest policies in achieving intended impacts on forest land-use, including land tenure, institutional and regulatory capacity of governments, the financial competitiveness of forestry as a land use, and a society’s cultural relationship to forests. Some of these factors typically differ between industrialized and developing countries. For example, in comparison to developing countries, industrialized countries tend to have relatively small amounts of unallocated public lands, and relatively strong institutional and regulatory capacities. Where appropriate, policy options and their effectiveness are examined separately for industrialized and developing countries. Because integrated and non-climate policies are designed primarily to achieve objectives other than net emissions reductions, evaluations of their effectiveness focus primarily on indicators, such as maintenance of forest cover. This provides only partial insight into their potential to mitigate climate change. Under conditions with high potential for leakage, for example, such indicators may overestimate the potential for carbon benefits (Section 9.6.3).