How Can Latin America Help the World to Cope with Climate Change?: The Issue of Deforestation

Latin America has a comparative advantage in deforestation compared to other forms of climate change mitigation. Thus, to the extent that Latin America should engage in mitigation, the optimal climate change policy should manage these advantages by generating incentives in Latin America to deal with forestry. This paper describes the problem of deforestation and studies the market failures that arise in relation to forestry emission problems, analyzing them from a global public good perspective. The paper additionally describes other problems related to forestry emission issues and presents a non-exhaustive review of the solutions currently proposed to address this issue. The paper concludes with policy recommendations.