Land-Use Change and Carbon Sinks: Econometric Estimation of the Carbon Sequestration Supply Function

By R. Lubowski, Andrew J. Plantinga, R. Stavins. 2005

502 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When and if the United States chooses to implement a greenhouse gas reduction program, it will be necessary to decide whether carbon sequestration policies - such as those that promote forestation and discourage deforestation - should be part of the domestic portfolio of compliance activities. We investigate the cost of forest-based carbon sequestration. In contrast with previous approaches, we econometrically examine micro-data on revealed landowner preferences, modeling six major private land uses in a comprehensive analysis of the contiguous United States. The econometric estimates are used to simulate landowner responses to sequestration policies. Key commodity prices are treated as endogenous and a carbon sink model is used to predict changes in carbon storage. Our estimated marginal costs of carbon sequestration are greater than those from previous engineering cost analyses and sectoral optimization models. Our estimated sequestration supply function is similar to the carbon abatement supply function from energy-based analyses, suggesting that forest-based carbon sequestration merits inclusion in a cost-effective portfolio of domestic U.S. climate change strategies.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad4cebbfaca925ea6dd9b638f31ca1817ade6c65

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Citations in the corpus

The efficiency of voluntary incentive policies for preventing biodiversity loss (2009, methodology): “2006, Lubowski et al. 2006).”
Projected land-use change impacts on ecosystem services in the United States (2014, methodology): “Plot-level land-use change is explained by county-specific net returns to each land use and each plot’s soil type and starting land use (4).”
The impacts of biofuel targets on land-use change and food supply: a global CGE assessment (2010, unknown): “(2) A i Li CET 1 CET i”
The Global Supply and Demand for Agricultural Land in 2050: A Perfect Storm in the Making? AAEA Presidential Address (2010, methodology): “Unlike Lubowski, Plantinga, and Stavins (2006); their unit of analysis is the county.”
Policy design for forest carbon sequestration: A review of the literature (2016, background): “It also excludes studies calculating the cost of carbon sequestration in terms of necessary compensation to forest owners (e.g. Lubowski et al., 2006; Yu et al., 2014).”