Assessing the ecological and economic benefits of Assisted Natural Regeneration in tropical degraded landscapes for climate regulation

• Ano de defesa: 2024
• Autor(a) principal: Boeni, Ana Flavia
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Bacia do Rio Doce; Carbon stock and sequestration; Climate change mitigation; Economic valuation; Ecosystem services; Forest restoration; Mitigação das mudanças climáticas; Restauração florestal; Rio Doce Basin; Sequestro de carbono; Serviços ecossistêmicos; Valoração econômica
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/11/11150/tde-07112024-112405/

The consequences of climate change are intensifying rapidly, making it urgent to promote efforts to mitigate its effects. Forest restoration emerges as a powerful tool for climate regulation, particularly because of its potential as a carbon sink. Brazil, with its vast expanse of degraded pasturelands, presents a significant opportunity for large-scale ecological restoration. In this context, Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR) is known for its cost-effectiveness and scalability potential. However, expanding the scale of restoration requires evidence-based public policies and the mobilization of private investments. Therefore, the general objective of this work is to investigate how to enhance the ecological and economic benefits of assisted natural regeneration in the Rio Doce Basin for climate regulation. This thesis is structured with a general introduction, followed by three main chapters, and concludes with a case study that connects to the previous chapters. We use a combination of systematic literature review, field studies, and economic analysis. The first chapter provides a comprehensive review of the economic valuation of climate regulation from forest ecosystems in Latin America. We identify high variability in monetary values and demonstrate that most studies conduct valuation based on market carbon prices, while the highest values of forests are obtained when the avoided cost method, represented by Social Cost of Carbon, is used. The second chapter explores the potential of natural regeneration in carbon storage after a history of deforestation, using field data from the Rio Doce Basin. The data show that converting forests to pasture results in significant carbon losses, about 95% above ground and 50% below ground, although natural regeneration contributes to the recovery of the stock, the process is slow. The third chapter focuses on ways to accelerate carbon sequestration in natural regeneration through different degrees of interventions, demonstrating that invasive grassland control and species enrichment techniques in ANR significantly enhance carbon sequestration after the 32 months studied. The final section presents a cost-benefit analysis of passive and assisted restoration, and the restoration costs per ton of CO2eq sequestered. We emphasize that although more intense interventions in assisted natural regeneration produce higher costs, they can generate greater benefits in relation to future carbon stocks in regenerating forests, which would represent a lower cost to society when compared to the potential damage caused by climate change. The results demonstrate the viability of assisted natural regeneration as a cost-effective strategy for restoring degraded landscapes, showing that the cost of inaction may be higher than applying diferent levels of interventions aiming forest restoration. This thesis contributes to the formulation of public policies and the engagement of private financing by highlighting the ecological and economic value of assisted natural regeneration for mitigating climate change. It provides a basis for future research to explore the long-term dynamics of carbon sequestration in assisted natural regeneration and the socioeconomic impacts of forest restoration projects.