When planting trees, how do you know how other land-owners will respond, based on market expectations decades into the future.
When delaying a harvest, how do you know how other land-owners will respond to rising timber or pulp prices?
Efforts to model timber markets in order to calculate the potential leakage associated with tree planting projects today, are frustrated by two realities:
Modeling large-scale tree planting is almost certain to suggest high levels of potential leakage.
Modeling individual tree-planting projects doesn’t work well because their impact is too small to really “see” in the model results.
It’s easy to envision categories of potential offset projects likely to suffer from very high leakage rates, even up to 100%, as well as categories of potential offset projects likely to result in no leakage.
But accurately quantifying leakage is often not possible, leading us back to leakage “confidence levels”.