Sensitivity of Carbon Emission Estimates from Indirect Land-Use Change

By Jérôme Dumortier, Dermot J. Hayes, M. Carriquiry, Fengxia Dong, Xiaodong Du, A. Elobeid, Jacinto F. Fabiosa, S. Tokgoz. 2011

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze the sensitivity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land-use change to modifications in assumptions concerning crop area, yield, and deforestation. For this purpose, we run a modified version of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Agricultural Outlook Model, which was used previously to assess the impacts of energy price increases and biofuel policy changes on land conversion. To calculate the GHG implications of agricultural activity, we use GreenAgSiM, a model developed to evaluate emissions from land conversion and agricultural production. Both models are applied to scenarios that lead to higher US ethanol production. The results are contrasted with the findings of Searchinger et al., and we explain the role of model assumptions to elucidate the differences. We find that the payback period of corn ethanol's carbon debt is sensitive to assumptions concerning land conversion and yield growth and can range from 31 to 180 years.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9368d2bd54c80eac64dfd38a173018718d7a315f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

1. Madhu Khanna
2. Christine Crago
3. R. Plevin
4. Felix Creutzig
5. M. Delucchi
6. Yi Yang
7. Sangwon Suh

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. Cheryl R. Doss
2. Allen Blackman
3. A. Kildegaard

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring Indirect Land Use Change with Biofuels: Implications for Policy (2011, background): “Even a small increase of 1% in the assumed rate of growth of yields reduces this “payback” period to 31 years (Dumortier et al. 2009).”
• Using Attributional Life Cycle Assessment to Estimate Climate‐Change Mitigation Benefits Misleads Policy Makers (2014, methodology): “In practice, however, methods to identify 74 Journal of Industrial Ecology market-mediated effects and marginal processes are incomplete and model results are scenario dependent (Dumortier et al. 2011; Khanna and Crago 2012).”
• Responsiveness of Crop Yield and Acreage to Prices and Climate (2016, unknown): “As is pointed out in Dumortier et al. (2011), inclusion of the response of yield to prices can significantly mitigate or even reverse the findings in Searchinger et al. (2008).”