The Demand for Voluntary Carbon Dioxide Removal – Experimental Evidence From an Afforestation Project in Germany

Comprehensive mitigation efforts (including all emission sources and sinks, all GHGs, and all economic sectors) are becoming ever-more important. While established methods of direct emissions avoidance must continue to form the basis for climate mitigation strategies, increasing attention is being paid to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies as a supplementary tool to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions. In this paper, we focus on the individual level perspective. In a framed field experiment, we examine individual willingness to pay (WTP) for carbon removal through afforestation on a German sample. We focus on the role played by the local co-benefits of climate protection activities, and add geo-data to our experimental data to analyze the impact of variation in individual geographic location on WTP. Our results indicate that WTP for carbon removal exceeds the WTP for emissions avoidance estimated by previous experimental studies. We do not find evidence that emphasizing co-benefits increases WTP for carbon removal more than would be expected. We conjecture that this result may stem from the non-observed beliefs and priors of the subjects. Additional survey data find that trust in forest measures is higher than mitigation through an emissions trading scheme, which could explain the comparably high WTP.

Bartels, Lara, Martin Kesternich and Andreas Löschel (2021), The Demand for Voluntary Carbon Dioxide Removal – Experimental Evidence From an Afforestation Project in Germany, ZEW Discussion Paper No. 21-088, Mannheim.