Afforestation Generated Kyoto Compliant Carbon Offsets: A Case Study in Northeastern Ontario

With the first commitment period beginning in 2008, resource managers are starting to consider the various management options available to them under the Kyoto Protocol. Though many papers discuss the potential for generating carbon offsets through afforestation at national, provincial and regional scales, none examine the factors critical to decision makers at the management unit level. This paper uses the best available modelling and economic data and applies it at the scale of the Timmins Management Unit (TMU), concentrating on the quality and availability of carbon budget models, domestic carbon market concerns (including price, leakage and permanence) and the presence of an enabling environment (considering government support, afforestation expertise, willingness among managers and land availability). A modelling exercise is then undertaken using GORCAM-WC1 under several scenarios, with ownership, leading species, investment horizon, site productivity and price as variable. The case study and model demonstrate that under current institutional frameworks and the guidelines of the Kyoto Protocol, afforestation projects with the purpose of generating carbon offsets in the TMU are not viable investments for the first commitment period, though it also shows that such projects will be profitable under certain conditions if constraints are removed and investment is long term. However, if one considers that the TMU is representative of Northeastern Ontario (and much of boreal Canada), the opportunities for Kyoto Protocol compliant afforestation for the generation of carbon offsets will likely be small for much of Canada during the first commitment period.Afforestation, carbon markets, carbon modelling, enabling environment, Kyoto Protocol, Northeastern Ontario, scenario development, Timmins management unit

Viability of Carbon Offset Generating Projects in Boreal Ontario

Carbon offsets generated under the Kyoto Protocol should be included in the management options that resource managers are considering. This paper investigates investments in afforestation for the generation of KP compliant carbon offsets in the Timmins Management Unit, concentrating on the availability of quality carbon budget models, domestic carbon market concerns and the presence of an enabling environment. A modelling exercise is undertaken using GORCAM-WC1, with ownership, leading species, investment horizon, site productivity and carbon price as variables. Under current institutional frameworks, afforestation projects with the purpose of generating carbon offsets in the TMU are not viable investments for the first commitment period, though such projects will be profitable under certain conditions if constraints are removed and investment is long term.Afforestation, Kyoto Protocol, Boreal Ontario, Carbon Sequestration

Security of Quantum Bit-String Generation

We consider the cryptographic task of bit-string generation. This is a generalisation of coin tossing in which two mistrustful parties wish to generate a string of random bits such that an honest party can be sure that the other cannot have biased the string too much. We consider a quantum protocol for this task, originally introduced in Phys. Rev. A {\bf 69}, 022322 (2004), that is feasible with present day technology. We introduce security conditions based on the average bias of the bits and the Shannon entropy of the string. For each, we prove rigorous security bounds for this protocol in both noiseless and noisy conditions under the most general attacks allowed by quantum mechanics. Roughly speaking, in the absence of noise, a cheater can only bias significantly a vanishing fraction of the bits, whereas in the presence of noise, a cheater can bias a constant fraction, with this fraction depending quantitatively on the level of noise. We also discuss classical protocols for the same task, deriving upper bounds on how well a classical protocol can perform. This enables the determination of how much noise the quantum protocol can tolerate while still outperforming classical protocols. We raise several conjectures concerning both quantum and classical possibilities for large n cryptography. An experiment corresponding to the scheme analysed in this paper has been performed and is reported elsewhere.Comment: 16 pages. No figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. A. A corresponding experiment is reported in quant-ph/040812

Concurrent Knowledge-Extraction in the Public-Key Model

Knowledge extraction is a fundamental notion, modelling machine possession of values (witnesses) in a computational complexity sense. The notion provides an essential tool for cryptographic protocol design and analysis, enabling one to argue about the internal state of protocol players without ever looking at this supposedly secret state. However, when transactions are concurrent (e.g., over the Internet) with players possessing public-keys (as is common in cryptography), assuring that entities ``know'' what they claim to know, where adversaries may be well coordinated across different transactions, turns out to be much more subtle and in need of re-examination. Here, we investigate how to formally treat knowledge possession by parties (with registered public-keys) interacting over the Internet. Stated more technically, we look into the relative power of the notion of ``concurrent knowledge-extraction'' (CKE) in the concurrent zero-knowledge (CZK) bare public-key (BPK) model.Comment: 38 pages, 4 figure

Australian carbon biosequestration and bioenergy policy co-evolution: mechanisms, mitigation and convergence

The intricacies of international land-use change and forestry policy reflect the temporal, technical and political difficulty of integrating biological systems and climate change mitigation. The plethora of co-existing policies with varied technical rules, accreditation requirements, accounting methods, market registries, etc., disguise the unequal efficacies of each mechanism. This work explores the co-evolution and convergence of Australian voluntary and mandatory climate-related policies at the biosequestration-bioenergy interface. Currently, there are temporal differences between the fast-evolving and precise climate-change mechanisms, and the long-term 'permanence' sought from land use changes encouraged by biosequestration instruments. Policy convergence that favours the most efficient, appropriate and scientifically substantiated policy mechanisms is required. These policies must recognise the fundamental biological foundation of biosequestration, bioenergy, biomaterial industrial development and other areas such as food security and environmental concerns. Policy mechanisms that provide administrative simplicity, project longevity and market certainty are necessary for rural and regional Australians to cost-effectively harness the considerable climate change mitigation potential of biological systems