Physical climate impacts ultimately manifest as economic damage: destroyed infrastructure, reduced agricultural productivity, health impacts, displacement, conflict, and long-term loss of ecosystem services. To compare these impacts across sectors and time horizons, economists use the social cost of carbon (SCC).
The social cost of carbon represents the estimated economic damage caused by emitting one additional tonne of CO₂ into the atmosphere, aggregated globally and discounted over time.
While estimates vary depending on assumptions, United States Environmental Protection Agency analyses place the SCC at approximately $190 per tonne of CO₂.
Source: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/15985-BPEA-BPEA-FA21_WEB_Rennert-et-al.pdf
As established in the previous sections, global LiDAR-based forest carbon measurement could prevent the mis-accounting of approximately 76 billion tonnes of CO₂ over the second half of the century.
Applying a $190 social cost of carbon yields:
This figure represents the economic value of emissions that would not be mistakenly permitted due to improved measurement accuracy. It is not speculative upside—it is risk avoided.
The social cost of carbon aggregates multiple categories of harm, including:
These costs are already being incurred today. The SCC simply provides a way to express them in consistent economic terms.
Preventing even small increments of warming near critical thresholds therefore delivers outsized economic benefit, particularly by reducing tail risks associated with irreversible damage.
Importantly, this economic impact does not depend on forests removing more carbon than they already do. It depends on knowing with greater confidence how much carbon is actually being removed.
In economic terms, LiDAR-enabled forest measurement functions as a risk-reduction infrastructure investment.
Where measurable economic value exists, markets tend to form. The $14 trillion figure does not represent revenue. What it does is define the upper bound of value creation enabled by better measurement.
The relevant question is therefore not whether value exists, but how much of it can be captured through services that improve confidence, verification, and accountability.
That question leads directly to the carbon market opportunity enabled by high-confidence forest measurement.