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Titre de la thèse

Pricing Credibility: Supply-Side Integrity and Public Acceptability in Nature Markets

In nature markets, carbon credits are a credence good: they promise a fixed quantity of climate benefit the buyer cannot verify even after purchase. Without credible third-party certification, adverse selection tends to underprice genuine, high-cost supply — making credibility the binding constraint on market function. My thesis measures that shortfall for forest-based climate mitigation. On the supply side, a carbon-accounting model prices leakage, finite storage, and reversal risk into credited tonnes across sixteen European forest practices. On the demand side, I measure public welfare from forest conservation and carbon offsetting, studying preference polarisation across citizen groups and whether citizens discount distant, privately delivered mitigation from preference or from distrust — estimated on a latent-class estimator I develop.
Alongside the research, I provide expert input on forest carbon certification and payment-for-ecosystem-services policy to the European Commission and EU Member States.

Environmental and resource economics; Carbon market design and integrity; Payments for ecosystem services; Political economy of climate policy; Choice modelling and machine learning; Environmental impact assessment

Highly Commended Paper Award, University of Leeds, Issued for the working paper: One Divide, Two Countries: Climate Concern Splits Support for Forest Conservation Programmes (title changed), presented at the 8th Workshop on Non-Market Valuation (WONV) conference in Leeds, UK