Projecting the Impact of Socioeconomic and Policy Factors on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Carbon Sequestration in U.S. Forestry and Agriculture

Wade, Christopher M.; Baker, Justin; Jones, Jamie N.; Cai, Yan; Hernandez, Alison Bean de; Latta, Gregory S.; Ohrel, Sara; Ragnauth, Shaun; Creason, Jared; McCarl, Bruce A.

doi:10.1561/112.00000545

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Exogenous yield changes are accompanied by changes in input use intensity (nitrogen, phosphorus, and water) and costs (i.e., an exogenous increase in corn yields sees a corresponding increase in fertilizer use and production costs, where the input intensity varies depending on the socio-economic scenario). 2 A similar approach (exogenous yield growth coupled with input intensification) has been applied in other U.S.-centric land sector models, including the intertemporal approach outlined in Wade et al (2022). Furthermore, reflecting potential yield growth with input intensification per unit area (but not necessarily per unit output) is consistent with observed intensification of some inputs in the U.S. agricultural system.…”

Section: Globiommentioning

confidence: 79%

“…While there have been several recent studies examining combinations of sustainability-related U.S. policy targets (Graham et al 2021;Gurgel et al 2021;Wade et al 2022), the literature modeling U.S. agriculture and forestry is currently lacking in its representation of demand-side sustainability policies, including transitions to healthier diets. While shifting to healthier diets is critical to reducing the noncommunicable disease burden (Willett et al 2019), understanding how dietary change could shift resource-intensive commodity production, land use and ecosystem services can help inform complementary sustainability and climate policy actions.…”

Section: The Sustainability Of Us Healthy Dietsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The global scale of many of these models allows representation of international trade and thus evaluation of leakage effects of domestic policies. Indirect sustainability levers such as shifting dietary preferences have received substantially less attention in the land use modeling literature relative to carbon pricing (Wade et al 2022), bioenergy, and traditional conservation incentives. However, recent analysis has started to move in this direction (Leclère et al 2020;Pérez-Domínguez et al 2021;Jha et al 2022;Mosnier et al 2022;Lehtonen and Ramo 2022).…”

Section: Modeling Approaches For Sustainable Dietsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contributions of healthier diets and agricultural productivity toward sustainability and climate goals in the United States

Baker

Wade

et al. 2022

Sustain Sci

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Meeting ambitious climate targets will require deploying the full suite of mitigation options, including those that indirectly reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Healthy diets have sustainability co-benefits by directly reducing livestock emissions as well as indirectly reducing land use emissions. Increased crop productivity could indirectly avoid emissions by reducing cropland area. However, there is disagreement on the sustainability of proposed healthy U.S. diets and a lack of clarity on how long-term sustainability benefits may change in response to shifts in the livestock sector. Here, we explore the GHG emissions impacts of seven scenarios that vary U.S. crop yields and healthier diets in the U.S. and overseas. We also examine how impacts vary across assumptions of future ruminant livestock productivity and ruminant stocking density in the U.S. We employ two complementary land use models—the US FABLE Calculator, an agricultural and forestry sector accounting model with high agricultural commodity representation, and GLOBIOM, a spatially explicit partial equilibrium optimization model for global land use systems. Results suggest that healthier U.S. diets that follow the Dietary Guidelines for Americans reduce agricultural and land use greenhouse gas emissions by 25–57% (approx 120–310 MtCO2e/y) and pastureland area by 28–38%. The potential emissions and land sparing benefits of U.S. agricultural productivity growth are modest within the U.S. due to the increasing comparative advantage of U.S. crops. Our findings suggest that healthy U.S. diets can significantly contribute toward meeting U.S. long-term climate goals for the land use sectors.

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Section: Globiommentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: The Sustainability Of Us Healthy Dietsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modeling Approaches For Sustainable Dietsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contributions of healthier diets and agricultural productivity toward sustainability and climate goals in the United States

Baker

Wade

et al. 2022

Sustain Sci

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“…However, disturbances may reduce the amount of carbon stored in unharvested boreal forests. Demand for wood can also support CDR via in-forest carbon storage as landowners may preinvest more in forest management. − While CO 2 sequestered by forestry practices can be stored for decades, the associated sinks will gradually become saturated. , BECCS plays an essential role in most climate change mitigation pathways limiting global temperature to 2 °C or below . However, the deployment of BECCS must incorporate the numerous strategies in which forests and forest-related sectors contribute to CDR because there could be trade-offs between carbon sequestration, storage, and biomass production, as well as between short-term and long-term GHG reduction targets .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Biogenic Carbon Neutrality Assumption for Achieving a Net-Zero Emission Target: Insights from a Techno-Economic Analysis

Kouchaki-Penchah

Bahn

Vaillancourt

et al. 2023

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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Global pathways limiting warming to 2 °C or below require deep carbon dioxide removal through a large-scale transformation of the land surface, an increase in forest cover, and the deployment of negative emission technologies (NETs). Government initiatives endorse bioenergy as an alternative, carbon-neutral energy source for fossil fuels. However, this carbon neutral assumption is increasingly being questioned, with several studies indicating that it may result in accounting errors and biased decision-making. To address this growing issue, we use a carbon budget model combined with an energy system model. We show that including forest sequestration in the energy system model alleviates the decarbonization effort. We discuss how a forest management strategy with a high sequestration capacity reduces the need for expensive negative emission technologies. This study indicates the necessity of establishing the most promising forest management strategy before investing in bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Finally, we describe how a carbon neutrality assumption may lead to biased decision-making because it allows the model to use more biomass without being constrained by biogenic CO2 emissions. The risk of biased decision-making is higher for regions that have lower forest coverage, since available forest sequestration cannot sink biogenic emissions in the short term, and importing bioenergy could worsen the situation.

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“…Nearly all of the studies that have suggested an expansive role for land use in climate mitigation have either focused on the near term (Griscom et al 2017), or they have ignored the role of the simultaneous impacts of climate change on both forests and agriculture (Riahi et al 2017, Roe et al 2019, Wade et al 2022. Given the large-scale impacts that climate change is projected to have on the underlying forest resources, these factors could generate misleading estimates of the costs of carbon storage in forests.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Costs of forest carbon sequestration in the presence of climate change impacts

Golub

Sohngen

Cai

et al. 2022

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Forests play a critical role in mitigating climate change, and, at the same time, are predicted to experience large-scale impacts of climate change that will affect the efficiency of forests in mitigation efforts. Projections of future carbon sequestration potential typically do not account for the changing economic costs of timber and agricultural production and land use change. We integrated a dynamic forward-looking economic optimization model of global land use with results from a dynamic global vegetation model and meta-analysis of climate impacts on crop yields to project future carbon sequestration in forests. We find that the direct impacts of climate change on forests, represented by changes in dieback and forest growth, and indirect effects due to lost crop productivity, together result in a net gain of 17 Gt C in aboveground forest carbon storage from 2000 to 2100. Increases in climate-driven forest growth rates will result in an 81-99% reduction in costs of reaching a range of global forest carbon stock targets in 2100, while the increases in dieback rates are projected to raise the costs by 57-132%. When combined, these two direct impacts are expected to reduce the global costs of climate change mitigation in forests by more than 70%. Inclusion of the third, indirect impact of climate change on forests through reduction in crop yields, and the resulting expansion of cropland, raises the costs by 11-38% and widens the uncertainty range. While we cannot rule out the possibility of climate change increasing mitigation costs, the central outcomes of the simultaneous impacts of climate change on forests and agriculture are 64-86% reductions in the mitigation costs. Overall, the results suggest that concerns about climate driven dieback in forests should not inhibit the ambitions of policy makers in expanding forest-based climate solutions.

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Projecting the Impact of Socioeconomic and Policy Factors on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Carbon Sequestration in U.S. Forestry and Agriculture

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

Contributions of healthier diets and agricultural productivity toward sustainability and climate goals in the United States

Contributions of healthier diets and agricultural productivity toward sustainability and climate goals in the United States

Impact of Biogenic Carbon Neutrality Assumption for Achieving a Net-Zero Emission Target: Insights from a Techno-Economic Analysis

Costs of forest carbon sequestration in the presence of climate change impacts

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