The Opportunity Cost of Land Use and the Global Potential for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in Agriculture and Forestry
By A. Golub, Thomas W. Hertel, Huey-Lin Lee, S. Rose, B. Sohngen. GTAP Working Paper, 2006
196 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper analyzes the role of global land-use in determining potential greenhouse gas mitigation by land-based activities in agriculture and forestry. Land-based activities are responsible for over a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet the economics of land-use decisions have not been explicitly modeled in global mitigation studies. In this paper, we develop a new, general equilibrium framework which effectively captures the opportunity costs of land-use decisions in agriculture and forestry, thereby allowing us to analyze competition for heterogeneous land types across and within sectors and input substitution between land and other factors of production. In our analysis of carbon taxation, we find significant changes in the global pattern of comparative advantage as a result of differential mitigation costs across sectors, regions, and land types. We find that forest carbon sequestration is the dominant strategy for GHG emissions mitigation globally in the land using sectors. However, when compared to the rest of the world, land-use emissions abatement in the US and China comes disproportionately from agriculture, and, within agriculture, disproportionately from reductions in fertilizer-related emissions. In the world as a whole, agriculture-related mitigation comes predominantly from reduced methane emissions in the ruminant livestock sector, followed by fertilizer and methane emissions from paddy rice. The results also show how analyses that only consider regional mitigation may under- or over-estimate mitigation potential. For example, U.S.-specific analyses likely over-estimate the potential for abatement in agriculture. Finally, we note that this general equilibrium framework provides the research community with a practical methodology for explicit modeling of global land competition and land-based mitigation in comprehensive assessments of greenhouse gas mitigation options.
Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c616cfdb6f56eebb83c8db5d3c4cd908218d3c1a
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Citations in the corpus
- Climate Change, Agriculture And Poverty (2010, background): “For example, Golub et al. (2009) estimate that a global agricultural carbon tax/forest sequestration subsidy of $28 per ton CO2 equivalent could boost world average prices by 31% for rice, 28% for ruminants and 11-13% for other crops.”
- The Global Supply and Demand for Agricultural Land in 2050: A Perfect Storm in the Making? AAEA Presidential Address (2010, background): “…agriculture - currently account for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions (Baumert, Herzog, and Pershing 2009), but, if incorporated into a global climate policy, these sectors could contribute up to half of all mitigation in the near term, at modest carbon prices (Golub et al. 2009).”
- Marginal abatement costs of greenhouse gas emissions from European agriculture, cost effectiveness, and the EU non-ETS burden sharing agreement (2011, background): “…engineering assessments of the costs and potential of abatement technologies (Beach et al., 2008; Moran et al., 2010; Höglund-Isaksson et al., 2010), and partial or general equilibrium models (McCarl & Schneider, 2001; Schneider et al., 2007; Pérez Domínguez et al., 2009; Golub et al., 2009).”