Quantifying risk of climate change to forest-based carbon projects

Year
2026
Primary Supervisor
Tim Baker
Institution
University of Leeds
CASE Partner
Academic Supervisors
Dr David Williams <[email protected]> (University of Leeds , School of Earth and Environment)
Research Themes
None
Project Partners
None
Research Keywords
None
Relevant Degree Courses
None

Background

Carbon finance in tropical countries has long been promised as a means to transform investment in conservation and to tackle climate change. Investors buy ‘credits’ representing carbon emissions, with the money invested in projects to capture and conserve carbon, most often in biological stores such as tropical rainforest. The hope is that these projects can both reduce carbon emissions and conserve threatened ecosystems. However, carbon projects on-the-ground are plagued with uncertainties over whether carbon will actually be stored over the long-term, which reduces confidence in financial returns and threatens the viability of carbon finance. One such uncertainty is the risk that climate change places on the long-term permanence of any emissions reductions, particularly in terms of more frequent droughts and rising temperatures.

PhD Opportunity

The challenge is to quantify the risk posed by climate change to the long-term viability of carbon credits, and propose solutions to mitigate such risk. In particular, projects could be compelled to hold a suitable level of carbon credits to hold in reserve as ‘buffers’, rather than being traded. Such buffers would be available to offset any carbon lost due to the impacts of climate change on the overall carbon stock.

How big these buffers need to be will depend on the location of the carbon project, the vegetation type, and the spatially explicit impacts of climate change. To estimate the size of buffer required by different projects in different locations, this PhD will (1) compile published information about short- and long-term impacts of drought on forest carbon stocks in tropical forest landscapes; (2) quantify the variability of predictions of increased drought across different tropical regions; (3) explore the resistance and resilience of the carbon stocks of tropical forests to these levels of increased tree mortality using a previously developed forest simulator; (4) estimate appropriate buffers for different carbon project case studies.

Applicant Profile

Interest in impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems, familiar with R and advanced statistical analysis.

Other information

ForestPlots.net
https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/geography/staff/998/prof-tim-baker