Bioenergy and the importance of land use policy in a carbon-constrained world

Calvin, Katherine V. ; Edmonds, James A. ; Wise, Marshall A.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (U.S.)

关键词: Biomass;    Economics;    09 Biomass Fuels;    Land Use;    Deforestation;   

DOI  :  10.2172/994040
RP-ID  :  PNNL-19462
RP-ID  :  AC05-76RL01830
RP-ID  :  994040

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

Policies aimed at limiting anthropogenic climate change would result in significant transformations of the energy and land-use systems. However, increasing the demand for bioenergy could have a tremendous impact on land use, and can result in land clearing and deforestation. Wise et al. (2009a,b) analyzed an idealized policy to limit the indirect land use change emissions from bioenergy. The policy, while effective, would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement in the real world. In this paper, we consider several different land use policies that deviate from this first-best, using the Joint Global Change Research Institute’s Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). Specifically, these new frameworks are (1) a policy that focuses on just the above-ground or vegetative terrestrial carbon rather than the total carbon, (2) policies that focus exclusively on incentivizing and protecting forestland, and (3) policies that apply an economic penalty on the use of biomass as a proxy to limit indirect land use change emissions. For each policy, we examine its impact on land use, land-use change emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, agricultural supply, and food prices.