Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is a payment for ecosystem services system created under the UN to reduce deforestation and degradation in developing countries. The REDD+ program creates markets for carbon sequestration services where REDD+ buyers are in UN-FCCC Annex 1 countries (developed countries) and sellers are in non-Annex 1 (typically developing countries). About 25% of the world’s forests are community managed (three times as much as private forests) but there is limited knowledge and information on preferences of households in communities with community managed forests toward programs like REDD+. Further, we do not have a good understanding of the true costs borne by these households when participating in programs like REDD+.
We use a choice experiment survey of rural Ethiopian communities to understand respondents’ preferences toward the institutional structure of REDD+ contracts. Choice experiment surveys, a non-market valuation technique, allow the researcher to elicit preferences, including the tradeoffs between characteristics of the good or policy being studied and the marginal willingness to pay for individual characteristics of the program/good being valued.
Preliminary results show that respondents care about how REDD+ programs are structured with regard to the manner in which the payments are divided between the households and the communities, the restrictions on using grazing land, and the level of payments received for the program. We find that the required firewood gathering reduction does not impact some households’ choice of REDD+ contracts. We are currently testing new methods in attribute non-attendance to better explain this finding
