Carbon sequestration potential of community forests in Bhutan: a possible forest carbon pathway, trade-offs, and stakeholder perceptions

, but this value is sensitive to factors such as leakage rates, transaction costs, and market conditions. Stakeholder perceptions about the trade-offs involved in managing community forests for carbon revealed a mix of positive and negative views across different stakeholder groups, highlighting both commonalties and differences. Before Bhutan engages in forest-based carbon markets, clarity is needed on issues such as carbon ownership, additionality, transaction costs, leakage, regulation of carbon sales and benefit distribution. By exploring the carbon pathway of forgoing timber harvesting and identifying the major information needs to engage in carbon markets, we provide the key elements of a framework for discussion of this and other forest carbon pathways (e.g., thinning and reforestation) to inform policy decision making.