What are the institutional, technological, and analytical requirements for monitoring biocarbon stocks and for distinguishing between changes in the stocks from “natural” drivers, general global socio-economic drivers, specific economic decision drivers (i.e. indirect land use change), and ecosystem specific management efforts to sequester biocarbon?

Biocarbon stocks are critical to the carbon cycle and climate change. Biocarbon stocks change in different places due to different combinations of drivers: social and natural, current and historic, direct and indirect. Determining whether we are making any headway in maintaining and enhancing biocarbon stocks will require considerable monitoring of the stocks, monitoring and analysis of the drivers, and credible models of how the drivers interact to affect biocarbon stocks.

Hopes for providing economic incentives for enhancing biocarbon stocks, especially if done through private markets as offsets in a cap and trade system, will require scientifically-informed public oversight to avoid creating fictitious assets that do nothing to mitigate climate change while having the potential to destabilize the economy with the acknowledgment of their fictitious nature. Non-market international agreements to manage biocarbon will also require scientifically-informed public oversight to assure national efforts are effective and agreements have meaning. If the institutional and technological requirements of managing biocarbon and determining the drivers of change are prohibitive, then there is a stronger reason to reduce fossil hydrocarbon combustion more quickly and directly reduce other socio-economic drivers of biocarbon stock change.

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