Plantation silviculture is much safer and bet-
ter-understood than deforestation avoidance as a
global warming mitigation option Ð i.e., uncer-
tainty is much lower in the case of plantations.
On the other hand, if successful, the potential
carbon gains from investments in deforestation
avoidance may be orders of magnitude greater
than the best possible gains from plantations.
The great disparity in the probability of success
requires a Bayesian approach to interpreting such
numbers.