This book concentrates on transactions involving forward carbon credits, in other words transactions where the parties to a contract agree to buy or sell carbon credits to be generated and delivered in the future. As a result, it does not deal either with transactions involving carbon credits already issued for immediate delivery on the spot market or with derivatives in the form of option contracts or future contracts through the developing exchange markets.

This book reports on the work carried out by the research project 'Kyoto: think global act local", which aims to bring local sustainable forest management projects under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. The book draws on work carried since 2003 at three sites in India and Nepal. In India, the project sites were in Uttarakhand state, and in Nepal, in Ilam, Lalitpur, and Manang districts. The project gathered data to show that community-managed forests can play important roles in mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change by sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere.