1st Edition

Economic Analysis of Land Use in Global Climate Change Policy

    368 Pages 86 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    368 Pages 86 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Land has long been overlooked in economics. That is now changing. A substantial part of the solution to the climate crisis may lie in growing crops for fuel and using trees for storing carbon. This book investigates the potential of these options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, estimates the costs to the economy, and analyses the trade-offs with growing food. The first part presents new databases that are necessary to underpin policy-relevant research in the field of climate change while describing and critically assessing the underlying data, the methodologies used, and the first applications.

    Together, the new data and the extended models allow for a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a land use and climate policy. This book outlines key empirical and analytical issues associated with modelling land use and land use change in the context of global climate change policy. It places special emphasis on the economy-wide competition for land and other resources, especially;

    • The implications of changes in land use for the cost of climate change mitigation,
    • Land use change as a result of mitigation, and
    • Feedback from changes in the global climate to land use.

    By offering synthesis and evaluation of a variety of different approaches to this challenging field of research, this book will serve as a key reference for future work in the economic analysis of land use and climate change policy.

    Part I: Introduction and motivation: 1 "Land Use in Computable General Equilibrium Models: An Overview" by Thomas Hertel, Steven Rose, Richard Tol: Part II: Empirical Foundations of Global Land Use Analyses: 2. "Global Agricultural Land Use Data for Climate Change Analysis" by Chad Monfreda, Navin Ramankutty and Thomas Hertel: 3. "Global Forestry Data for the Economic Modeling of Land Use" by Brent Sohngen, Colleen Tennity, Marc Hnythka and Karl Meeusen: 4. "An Integrated Land Use Data Base for CGE Analysis of Climate Policy Options" by Huey-Lin Lee, Thomas Hertel, Steven Rose and Misak Avetsiyan: 5. "Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data for Climate Change Analysis" by Steven Rose and Huey-Lin Lee: Part III: Modeling Global Land Use for Climate Change Policy Analysis: 6. "Modeling Land-use Related Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks and their Mitigation Potential", by Thomas Hertel, Huey-Lin Lee, Steven Rose and Brent Sohngen: 7. "Modeling the Competition for Land: Methods and Application to Climate Policy" by Ron Sands and Man-Keun Kim: 8. "Biomass Energy and Competition for Land", by John Reilly and Sergey Paltsev: 9. "The Impact of Environmental and Climate Constraints on Global Food Supply" by Bas Eickhout, Hans van Meijl, Andrzej Tabeau and E. Stehfest: 10. "Land Use Modeling in a Recursively Dynamic, General Equilibrium Framework" by Alla Golub, Thomas Hertel and Brent Sohngen: 11. The Role of Forest Carbon Sequestration in General Equilibrium Models" by Brent Sohngen, Alla Golub and Thomas Hertel: 12. "KLUM: A Land Use Model for Coupling Large-Scale Crop and Trade Models" by Kerstin Ronneberger, Maria Berrittella, Francesco Bosello, and Richard Tol

    Biography

    Thomas W. Hertel is Executive Director and founder of the Global Trade Analysis Project at Purdue University, USA.

    Steven Rose is a senior research economist at the Electric Power Research Institute in the Global Climate Change Research Group in Washington, DC, and was recently a senior researcher at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

    Richard S. J. Tol is Research Professor at the Economics and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

    'Across the material we find three aspects in this book that we think are particularly valuable. The first is the emphasis on the economics of global scale land-based mitigation, land competition, and conventional land use opportunity costs. Second, there is material presented on the design of CGE models to capture land availability, competition, and physical characteristics. Third and finally, the authors discuss and assess deficiencies in the studies presented and identify directions for future research'.

    - Jianhong Mu, Siyi Feng and Bruce A. McCarl, Texas A&M University, USA