| dc.description.abstract | This research examines how carbon markets, specifically Compliance Carbon Markets (CCMs) and Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCMs), can serve as an additional source of revenue for forest landowners and as policy tools to support green innovation and emissions reduction in response to global climate change efforts. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) approach, the first chapter reviews the literature on forest carbon markets from 2005 to 2024, analyzing trends, challenges, and future directions through a systematic review and bibliometric analysis of publications from Scopus and Web of Science databases. The study highlights that those countries with strong economies and environmental focus lead in research, with key journals such as Energy Policy, Forest Policy and Economics and Carbon Management contributing significantly. Trending topics include carbon, forestry, climate change, carbon sequestration, commerce, carbon emissions, and forest management, while the study also identifies and examines some misconceptions within the forest carbon markets literature and highlights the challenges and opportunities for expanding the forest carbon market in the future.
The second chapter examines how forest landowners in the U.S. South can trade carbon credits and how rising carbon prices could encourage shifts from marginal agricultural land to forest land. By comparing forest land rent (FLR) and agricultural land rent (ALR) under different carbon price scenarios, the chapter finds that pine plantations become more profitable than agriculture on marginal land showing that 6.5, 6.5, and 6.6 million hectares of marginal agricultural land in the U.S. South can transition to forest land from loblolly, shortleaf, and slash plantations, respectively, at $6.53 /tCO2e, while hardwood plantations require higher prices and show more limited potential.
The third chapter assesses the impact of California's cap-and-trade program (CATP) on green innovation using environmental patents as a proxy. Using a Difference-in-Differences approach (DID) with county-level data (2000 to 2022) from California and neighboring states, the study finds that CATP significantly boosts green innovation, especially in eastern, densely populated counties and those at the California-Nevada border. State and city-level analyses confirm these results, and various robustness checks support the reliability of the findings.
The final chapter evaluates the effects of CATP on emissions, economic growth, air quality, and health outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences method with 2010–2019 county-level data, we find that CATP reduced per capita total direct and CO₂ emissions while boosting GDP and employment in California’s border counties. State-level synthetic control analysis (1960–2019) shows significant emission reductions only in the transportation sector. Health co-benefits include fewer respiratory and cardiovascular hospitalizations and deaths, despite modest air quality improvements. A few robustness checks including parallel trend, placebo test and heterogeneity tests validate these findings. | en_US |
