Where benefits and costs accrue at different scales, financial intermediaries are needed to facilitate relations between global-scale buyers and local-scale providers of carbon sequestration and storage. These intermediaries can help to collect and distribute payments and to promote the scheme to potential beneficiaries. The benefits distributed should compensate for the transaction, opportunity and implementation costs incurred by stakeholders for providing ecosystem services. Therefore, calculating the costs and understanding who incurs them are essential for benefit sharing. Targeting benefits according to a set of criteria that match the objectives of the specific mechanism increases the mechanism’s efficiency. As the level of performance-based payments may not be able to compete with the opportunity costs of highly profitable land uses, performance-related benefit-sharing mechanisms should be focused on areas with moderate opportunity costs. Benefits should be divided into upfront payments to cover startup costs and to give an initial incentive for participation, and payments upon delivery of ecosystem services to ensure adherence to conditionality.

There is evidence that institutions related to climate change and natural resource management influence each other’s performance, and that local settings also shape policy outcomes. We examine how policy implementation processes and institutional interactions affect the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program in Cameroon. Research on REDD+ implementation has focused on resource tenure, benefit-sharing and participation, giving less attention to how implementation paradigms and other institutions affect REDD+. We combine a policy implementation framework with the theories of institutional interaction to examine how REDD+ implementation typologies, and interactions with forestry regulations influence the outcomes of three REDD+ pilot projects in South and West Cameroon. Drawing from focus group discussions with project beneficiaries and interviews with local stakeholders and land-users, we find that REDD+ projects epitomize political implementation in the South and experimental implementation in the West. We also indicate how project outcomes have been affected by rules regarding community forests, reforestation and timber processing. Our findings suggest that policy designers’ ability to satisfy community preferences is important for projects’ outcomes in the South, and that resource availability and social capital are pivotal in the West. Incentives to promote local timber processing, improve forest governance and expedite decentralization would improve REDD+ project implementation in Cameroon.

In recent decades agricultural commodity surpluses in the developed world have contributed to a mantra of 'land surplus' in which set-aside, extensification, alternative land uses and 'wilding' have been key terms in debates over land. Quite suddenly all this has changed as a consequence of rapidly shifting commodity markets. Prices for cereals, oil seeds and other globally traded commodities have risen sharply. A contributor to this has been the shift to bioenergy cropping, fuelled by concerns over post-peak oil and climate change. Agricultural supply chain interests have embraced the 'new environmentalism' of climate change with enthusiasm, proudly proclaiming the readiness of the industry to produce both food and energy crops, and to do so with a neo-liberal confidence in markets to determine the balance between food and non-food crops in land use. But policy and politics have not necessarily caught up with these market and industry-led changes and some environmentalists are beginning to challenge the assumptions of the new 'productivism'. Is it necessarily the case, they ask, that agriculture's best contribution to tackling climate change is to grow bioenergy crops or invest in anaerobic-digesters or make land over for windfarms? Might not there be an equally important role in maximising the carbon sequestration or water-holding properties of biodiverse land? What is Land For? tackles these key cutting-edge issues of this new debate by setting out a baseline of evidence and ideas.

This Working Group III contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report provides a comprehensive and transparent assessment of the literature on climate change mitigation. The report assesses progress in climate change mitigation options for reducing emissions and enhancing sinks. With greenhouse gas emissions at the highest levels in human history, this report provides options to achieve net zero, as pledged by many countries. The report highlights for the first time the social and demand-side aspects of climate mitigation, and assesses the literature on human behaviour, lifestyle, and culture, and its implications for mitigation action. It brings a wide range of disciplines, notably from the social sciences, within the scope of the assessment. IPCC reports are a trusted source for decision makers, policymakers, and stakeholders at all levels (international, regional, national, local) and in all branches (government, businesses, NGOs). Available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Annotation Chapters in this book focus on the people, economy, environment, states and markets, world view, and global links for 148 countries. As a whole, these chapters present an expanded view of the world economy. Introductions highlight recent research on major development issues worldwide.

For the Yearbook of International Organizations, the most up-to-date and comprehensive reference to international organizations, the UIA has selected the most important 31,086 organizations from its extensive database of current and previous organizations. Yearbook provides profiles of 5,546 intergovernmental and 25,540 international non-governmental organizations active in nearly 300 countries and territories in the world today. Organization descriptions listed in Volume 1 are numbere sequentially to facilitate quick and easy cross-referencing from the other Yearbook Volumes. Users can refer to Volumes 2 and 3 to locate organizations by region or subject respectively, and comprehensive indexes are included. Naturally, the high standards of accuracy, consistency and detail set by previous editions of the Yearbook of International Organizations have been maintained for this edition.