The status of forest carbon markets in Latin America

Tropical rainforests of Latin America (LATAM) are one of the world's largest carbon sinks, with substantial future carbon sequestration potential and contributing a major proportion of the global supply of forest carbon credits. LATAM is poised to contribute predominantly towards high-quality forest carbon offset projects designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, halt biodiversity loss, and provide equitable conservation benefits to people. Thus, carbon markets, including compliance carbon markets and voluntary carbon markets continue to expand in LATAM. However, the extent of the growth and status of forest carbon markets, pricing initiatives, stakeholders, amongst others, are yet to be explored and extensively reviewed for the entire LATAM region. Against this backdrop, we reviewed a total of 299 articles, including peer-reviewed and non-scientific gray literature sources, from January 2010 to March 2023. Herein, based on the extensive literature review, we present the results and provide perspectives classified into five categories: (i) the status and recent trends of forest carbon markets (ii) the interested parties and their role in the forest carbon markets, (iii) the measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) approaches and role of remote sensing, (iv) the challenges, and (v) the benefits, opportunities, future directions and recommendations to enhance forest carbon markets in LATAM. Despite the substantial challenges, better governance structures for forest carbon markets can increase the number, quality and integrity of projects and support the carbon sequestration capacity of the rainforests of LATAM. Due to the complex and extensive nature of forest carbon projects in LATAM, emerging technologies like remote sensing can enable scale and reduce technical barriers to MRV, if properly benchmarked. The future directions and recommendations provided are intended to improve upon the existing infrastructure and governance mechanisms, and encourage further participation from the public and private sectors in forest carbon markets in LATAM

FADING GREEN: DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING AND ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS IN TÜRKİYE

reservedThis thesis was conducted in pursuit of depicting the relationship between democratic backsliding and environmental movements in the country profile Türkiye. Türkiye's democratic backsliding has led to restrictions on the right to freedom of speech and assembly as a result environmental movements have struggled to plan successful demonstrations and advocate for sustainable policies; the restrictions have limited their ability to address urgent ecological issues as environmental activists face political and legal barriers to speaking out. To examine the relationship between the variables the Democracy Index of Freedom House's Country Profile (Türkiye) and the efficiency of environmental protest events is considered through assessment of the political opportunity structures that support and impede environmental movements as the main methods of the research. This research aims to emphasize the crucial connection between democratic backsliding and the difficulties faced by environmental movements in Türkiye by examining specific instances of how democratic erosion has restricted the political opportunity structures within environmental movements and impacted their capacity to make change