LULUCF SECTOR INVOLVEMENT IN MITIGATION POLICIES ACROSS CARBON MARKETS

LULUCF sector inclusion in mitigation strategies across countries still remains controversial. This sector, accounting for more than 30% of international GHG emissions, present today an enormous potential in terms of carbon sink. When considering forestry and agricultural lands management, carbon accountability, additionality, leakage and permanence, still present some uncertainties. This is the reason why, at international level, many progresses in terms of binding agreements still need to be done. These ongoing discussions between UNFCCC parties, Kyoto members and parallel technical sessions, have strongly impacted the inclusion of LULUCF sector across carbon markets. Most regulatory ETS around the world did not include the sector in the scheme waiting for new international agreements. CDM and JI mechanisms only accept a limited number of activities coming from LULUCF offset projects. Some encouraging possibilities for this sector come from existing and planned voluntary markets. The objective of the present paper is to analyze how the entire LULUCF sector is taken into consideration across carbon markets both as ETS sector and for carbon compensation. Six cases study have been analyzed. Five of them already exist , one is under development . Through this analysis we wanted to answer to some key questions like the following: -which methodologies and standards are mostly taken into consideration? -is the sector differently considered when speaking about voluntary and regulatory markets? -which offsets prices are adopted in terms of LULUCF credits? After a preliminary introduction about ongoing discussions at the international level on LULUCF, the analysis examined different case studies to detect different approaches and the different implications within the LULUCF sector. The paper concluded with key reflections on the still limited but growing role of the sector in terms of climate change mitigation potential and future expectation.