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Forest is an important ecological and economic resource that is an effective way to achieve green economic development. Forests are the largest carbon pool in terrestrial ecosystems and play an irreplaceable role in carbon sequestration. The development of forestry can bring economic income to areas rich in forest resources. Forest carbon sinks can realize its economic value through its contribution to climate change through the carbon trading market and forest tourism also bring benefit (Song et al., 2020). Under the background of carbon neutrality, the role of forest carbon sinks has gradually received widespread attention. Kyoto Protocol is the first international policy to recognize the role of forest carbon sinks on climate change, whether it has promoted the development of forest carbon sinks is worth studying. With the advent of the big data era, more information can be obtained, thus realizing effective management of forest resources. Big data analytics outperform traditional statistical approaches (Gholami, Nishant, & Emrouznejad, 2021). The identification of the policy effect on the development of forest carbon sinks needs to be compared with the gap between the countries that have signed the protocol and the countries that have not. The data-driven fitting method can effectively construct counterfactuals and identify the size of the policy effect. Hence, it offers new opportunities for this study.
From a data perspective, it is easy to understand climate change. Figure 1 shows the trend of global temperature changes from 1961 to 2019. It could be found that the temperature change is on the rise, and the temperature rise is more evident. There was still a drop before the 1990s. Since the 1990s, the temperature rise has become more and more obvious. Besides, it could be seen that Annex B countries have a larger temperature change range than Non-Annex B countries. Among them, Annex B countries refer to industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol had formulated emission reduction tasks for the Annex B countries that have signed the Protocol. In the Kyoto Protocol, greenhouse gas emissions are calculated based on net emissions, that is, the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by forests should be subtracted from the country's actual emissions.
Figure 1.
The trend of global temperature changes from 1961 to 2019 (Source: FAO)
Chen et al. (2020)
believed that the relationship between technological progress and carbon emissions is complex and depends on changes in environmental technology and production technology. However, there are two main ways of technological progress to mitigate climate change: one is to reduce carbon sources, that is, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from human activities; the other is to increase carbon sinks. Forests can absorb and fix carbon dioxide within a certain time which is the forest carbon sink. The Kyoto Protocol recognized the contribution of forest carbon sinks to climate change for the first time in international policies and required the strengthening of sustainable forest management and vegetation protection. And the Bali Road Map determined an action to reduce emissions in developing countries, that is, reducing emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). Then, the Copenhagen Agreement proposed REDD+, and the meaning of plus is to improve forest carbon sinks. To study whether the Kyoto Protocol promoted the development of forest carbon sinks, forest carbon sinks in Annex B countries and non-Annex B countries can be compared.
Considering the problem explored, the structure of this paper is as follows: The second section is a literature review to make a theoretical analysis and introduction of the contributions. The third part introduces the method and the indicators adopted by this study. The fourth section shows the results and discussions, the fifth part is the robustness test and the last section summarizes the conclusions and proposes policy implications.