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Modeling Agriculture And Land Use In An Integrated Assessment Framework

The Agriculture and Land Use (AgLU) model is a top-down economic model with just enough structure to simulate global land-use change and the resulting carbon emissions over one century. These simulations are done with and without a carbon policy represented by a positive carbon price. Increases in the carbon price create incentives for production of commercial biomass that affect the distribution of other land types and, therefore, carbon emissions from land-use change. Commercial biomass provides a link between the agricultural and energy systems. The Integrated Assessment of Climate Protection Strategies (ICLIPS) core model uses AgLU to provide estimates of carbon emissions from land-use change as one component of total greenhouse gas emissions. Each major land-use type is assigned an average carbon density used to calculate a total carbon stock; carbon emissions from land-use change are calculated as the change in carbon stock between time periods. Significant carbon emissions from land-use change are present even in the reference scenario. An aggressive ICLIPS mitigation scenario results in carbon emissions from land-use change up to 800 million metric tons per year above the AgLU reference scenario.

Author(s)
Sands, R.S.
Contact Person
Ronald Sands
Contact Organization
Battelle
Contact Email
Bioenergy Category
Publication Date
DOI is live on OSTI.
Attachment Size
 KC_090916160521.pdf 239.76 KB