More than a decade after the global adoption of REDD+ as a climate change mitigation strategy, countries have started accessing results-based payments. However, the extent to which payments are actually based on results is unknown, necessitating program evaluations to establish the contribution of REDD+ to the Paris NDCs. We undertake a microeconometric evaluation of one of the most globally significant REDD+ initiatives, Indonesia’s moratorium on forest concessions, in which a payment has been awarded. At the agreed US$5/tCO2-eq, the value of our estimated cumulative carbon emissions far exceeds the proposed payment from the donor, Norway. Although cost-effective, the emissions reductions only contribute 3 to 4% of Indonesia’s NDC. This contribution could be increased in new initiatives with better-designed incentives and institutional arrangements.
All replication materials, including processed datasets, regression routines, and R scripts used to generate our results, have been deposited in Harvard Dataverse (<https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0EUW82>). Previously published data were used for this work ([38][1], [64][2], [65][3], [69][4][⇓][5][⇓][6]–[72][7], [93][8]).