Mitigating greenhouse gases: The importance of land base interactions between forests, agriculture, and residential development in the face of changes in bioenergy and carbon prices

a r t i c l e i n f o The forest sector can contribute to atmospheric greenhouse gas reduction, while also providing other environmental, economic, and social benefits. Policy tools for climate change mitigation include carbon-related payment programs as well as laws and programs to impede the loss of agricultural and forest lands to development. Policy makers will base their expectations of the effectiveness of these strategies to some degree on anticipated land use impacts. We examine a number of scenarios about carbon prices, urban development rates, and potential future land transfers between forestry and agriculture to provide information about the potential effectiveness of policies to address climate change in the U.S. Because large areas of land can move between forestry and agricultural uses, we used the Forest and Agriculture Sector Optimization Model-Greenhouse Gases model to examine responses between sectors as part of GHG policy analysis. The model projects changes in land uses, has full carbon accounting for both forestry and agriculture, and can examine a broad range of adaptation and climate change mitigation options. Modeling results suggest that receipt of carbon-related payments by landowners in forestry and agriculture can have substantial impacts on future land use patterns, levels of terrestrial carbon sequestration, forest resource conditions, agricultural production trends, and bioenergy production. Policy makers are examining a wide array of alternatives for climate change mitigation. The forest sector can potentially provide significant contributions both by preventing emissions through fossil fuel replacement and by sequestering greenhouse gases, while also providing other environmental, economic, and social benefits. Policy tools that could affect forests include payments for carbon sequestration to stimulate more storage of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and measures to slow or reduce losses of forest area to developed uses and agriculture and thereby reduce forest-based GHG emissions. Deforestation globally released an estimated 136 billion tonnes of carbon or 33% of the total emissions between 1850 and 1998 (Watson et al., 2000), exceeding any other anthropogenic activity besides energy production. The United States likewise has substantial deforestation, and preventing GHG emissions from deforestation as an avoided land-use change is receiving increased attention (e.g., Society of American Foresters, SAF, 2008). In the United States between 1982 and 1997, more than 9 million ha were deforested in total, with more than 4 million ha converted to developed uses (USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, 2000). Between 1992 and 1997, the rate of deforestation increased …