Asia’s grasslands provide livelihoods for some of the region’s poorest people. Widespread grassland degradation reduces the resilience and returns to herding livelihoods. Reversing degradation and conserving grasslands could not only improve herders’ situation, but also make a huge contribution to mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon in soils. However, the means for reaching each of these objectives are not necessarily the same. To realize this potentially huge dual livelihood/climate change mitigation outcome from improved grassland management, it is necessary to have detailed understanding of the processes involved in securing better livelihoods and sequestering carbon. Based on household surveys on the Tibetan Plateau and modelling results, this study estimates economic and market costs of grassland carbon sequestration, and analyzes the implications of household and carbon project cash flows for the design of financing options. Five scenarios are modelled involving cultivation of grass on severely degraded grassland (all scenarios) and reduced grazing intensity on less degraded land, which requires destocking by 29%, 38%, 47%, 56% and 65% in each scenario). Modelling results suggest that economic benefits for herders are positive at low levels of destocking, and negative at high levels of destocking, but initial investments and opportunity costs are significant barriers to adoption for households in all destocking scenarios. Existing rural finance products are not suitable for herders to finance the necessary investments. Market costs – the cost at which transactions between herders and carbon project developers are feasible – depend on the scale of project implementation but are high compared to recent carbon market prices. Large initial investments increase project developers’ financing costs and risk, so co-financing of initial investments by government would be necessary. Therefore, public policies to support grassland carbon sequestration should consider the potential roles of a range of financial instruments.

中文翻译：

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草地碳隔离的市场成本和融资选择：来自青海的经验证据和模型证据

亚洲的草原为该地区的一些最贫困人口提供了生计。广泛的草地退化降低了复原力并恢复了牧民生计。逆转退化和保护草原不仅可以改善牧民的状况，而且还可以通过隔离土壤中的碳来为缓解气候变化做出巨大贡献。但是，实现这些目标的方法不一定相同。为了从改善的草地管理中实现潜在的巨大的双重生计/气候变化缓解结果，有必要对确保更好的生计和碳封存所涉及的过程有详细的了解。根据对青藏高原的家庭调查和建模结果，本研究估算了草地固碳的经济和市场成本，并分析了家庭和碳项目现金流量对设计融资方案的影响。对五种情景进行了建模，其中包括在严重退化的草地上种植草（所有情景），以及在退化程度较低的土地上降低放牧强度，每种情景下需要减少29％，38％，47％，56％和65％的放牧量。模拟结果表明，在低库存水平下牧民的经济利益是正的，而在高库存水平下牧民的经济利益是负的，但是初始投资和机会成本是在所有去库存情况下家庭采用的重大障碍。现有的农村金融产品不适合牧民筹集必要的投资。市场成本（牧民和碳项目开发商之间可行的交易成本）取决于项目实施的规模，但与最近的碳市场价格相比较高。大量的初始投资会增加项目开发商的融资成本和风险，因此政府必须共同出资进行初始投资。因此，支持草原固碳的公共政策应考虑一系列金融工具的潜在作用。