Plantation silviculture is much safer and better-understood than deforestation avoidance as a global warming mitigation option Ð i.e., uncertainty 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. As in gambling, a prize of fabulous
value is misleading if the probability of winning it is minuscule. The expected monetary value (EMV) of each choice is the value of the payoff for each outcome multiplied by its respective probability of occurrence, summed over all possible outcomes associated with each decision (e.g.