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Achievement of Paris climate goals unlikely due to time lags in the land system
Abstract
Achieving the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting average global temperature increases to 1.5 °C requires substantial changes in the land system. However, individual countries’ plans to accomplish these changes remain vague, almost certainly insufficient and unlikely to be implemented in full. These shortcomings are partially the result of avoidable ‘blind spots’ relating to time lags inherent in the implementation of land-based mitigation strategies. Key blind spots include inconsistencies between different land-system policies, spatial and temporal lags in land-system change, and detrimental consequences of some mitigation options. We suggest that improved recognition of these processes is necessary to identify achievable mitigation actions, avoiding excessively optimistic assumptions and consequent policy failures.
... Though implementation cost estimates vary widely in literature, these can be as high as 65-85% of the total carbon credit cost for an agricultural offset scheme in Western Canada 73 . Several structural, institutional or social and behavioural barriers need to be overcome before realizing the estimated mitigation potentials 17,74 , such as uncertainty on short-term adoption potentials given farm structure, land tenure rights or inertia of land owners, high monitoring, reporting and verification costs that impede adoption beyond large companies and farms or lack of institutional capacity to enforce policy targets [74][75][76][77] . Together with risks related to performance and additionality of generated carbon sinks 17 , this makes large-scale uptake of these options and inclusion in a policy scheme at a global scale rather unlikely in the short term. ...
... Agricultural mitigation policies should be designed in an integrated and coordinated manner across gases, sectors and world regions to avoid rebound or leakage effects 38,75,78 . However, since the time it takes to prepare, formulate and adopt agricultural policies is probably the number of years left to keep the 1.5 °C target feasible with current emission levels 79 (for example, a first legislative proposal for the EU Common Agriculture Policy for the period 2023-2027 was published by the European Commission in 2018 80 ), agricultural mitigation policy design would need to see unprecedented fast tracking to bring any substantial benefits already by 2030. ...
... Main elements of the quantified mitigation scenarios are different GHG price trajectories on AFOLU emissions/removals and alternative bioenergy demand trajectories. We simulate a linearly increasing AFOLU GHG price from 2030 onwards that reaches 25,50,75,100,125,150,175 and 200 USD 2000 tCO 2 e −1 by 2050. GHG prices were converted ex post from USD 2000 to USD 2022 , applying a global uniform conversion rate of 1.63 using the US GDP deflator from the World Bank. ...
Carbon sequestration on agricultural land, albeit long-time neglected, offers substantial mitigation potential. Here we project, using an economic land-use model, that these options offer cumulative mitigation potentials comparable to afforestation by 2050 at 160 USD2022 tCO2 equivalent (tCO2e⁻¹), with most of it located in the Global South. Carbon sequestration on agricultural land could provide producers around the world with additional revenues of up to 375 billion USD2022 at 160 USD2022 tCO2e⁻¹ and allow achievement of net-zero emissions in the agriculture, forestry and other land-use sectors by 2050 already at economic costs of around 80–120 USD2022 tCO2e⁻¹. This would, in turn, decrease economy-wide mitigation costs and increase gross domestic product (+0.6%) by the mid-century in 1.5 °C no-overshoot climate stabilization scenarios compared with mitigation scenarios that do not consider these options. Unlocking these potentials requires the deployment of highly efficient institutions and monitoring systems over the next 5 years across the whole world, including sub-Saharan Africa, where the largest mitigation potential exists.
... How do states balance the potential benefits of ambitious pledging with the potential adverse consequences of non-compliance in the Paris pledges? Whereas existing climate politics literature has argued that the upside of ambitious pledging prompts cheap talk and imprudently high mitigation targets in NDCs (Nemet et al., 2017;Victor et al., 2017;Brown et al., 2019;Rowan, 2019), we propose that the inability of states to perfectly gauge their mitigation potential exerts the opposite effect-prudence-on ambition levels. All states that submit an NDC are aware that their compliance performance will be scrutinized by the Paris Agreement's review mechanism, other states, environmental NGOs, interest groups, and potentially domestic courts. ...
... Overall, the implications of commitment ambiguity for international climate cooperation are bifurcated. While we find limited evidence that ambiguity equates with strategic pledging and cheap talk (Nemet et al., 2017;Victor et al., 2017;Brown et al., 2019;Rowan, 2019), many states that have ambiguous targets could potentially have pledged more ambitiously if the Paris Agreement's transparency requirements were stricter. The pursuit of a more robust transparency rulebook in post-Paris negotiations thus appears worthwhile (e.g, van Asselt et al., 2018;Weikmans et al., 2019). ...
The Paris Agreement on climate change is built around a pledge-and-review system, wherein countries submit nationally determined pledges of mitigation commitments. While the agreement’s flexible design has attracted broad participation, its lenient informational requirements for pledges have also engendered considerable ambiguity in countries’ commitments. What are the implications of commitment ambiguity on the credibility of compliance and treaty effectiveness more broadly? This article sheds light on these questions by evaluating the relationship between commitment ambiguity and ambition in countries’ Paris pledges. We introduce a model that disentangles commitment ambiguity into two distinct forms: structural and strategic. We argue that structural ambiguity, which arises from constraints on the information necessary for governments to accurately assess their commitment potential, dampens the ambition levels of pledges. This prudence effect is driven by compliance concern: the anticipation of audience costs in case of non-compliance induces policymakers to adjust ambition downwards. Our empirical analysis of countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions demonstrates that ambiguous pledges exhibit lower ambition than precise ones. In line with our theory, this prudence effect of ambiguity is mainly pronounced among democracies, which face higher domestic audience costs in case of non-compliance with pledges than autocracies. This article contributes a novel theory of ambiguity and ambition in international institutions, which shows how audience-based compliance concerns can discipline cheap talk. Moreover, the article’s empirical findings provide insight into the credibility of countries’ climate pledges under the Paris Agreement, with implications for the treaty’s overall effectiveness prospects.
... Policy interventions in the land system must address a wide range of interacting processes to achieve ambitious but essential goals including climate change mitigation and adaptation (Guo et al., 2024), food security (Qi et al., 2018), and biodiversity recovery (Broussard et al., 2023). Progress towards these goals has been fitful at best, and absent at worst, with many policies being counterproductive, mutually confounding, or subject to frequent changes that undermine their efficacy (Brown et al., 2019a;Lee et al., 2019). The EU's Common Agricultural Policy alone provides a rich array of recent examples, with repeated attempts to balance food security and environmental protection largely failing, and the premature abandonment of controversial policies in the face of public opposition, such as farmer protests (Catalan News, 2024; European Court of Auditors, 2017). ...
... Hence, a time lag is added to periodically trigger the evaluation and adaptation procedures for each policy (e.g. see Brown et al. (2019a) for a discussion of time lags in the land system). Time lags can be fixed or changed over time to reflect different triggering mechanisms of policy adaptation. ...
Policy interventions have substantial effects on land use change, providing key levers for multiple objectives, including mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss, and maintaining food security. Policy effects are often complicated, conflicting, and subject to regular change. Despite this, land system models typically treat policies as simple, exogenous modifications to models. To better represent the dynamic nature of policy-making, we develop an endogenous institutional model that can be embedded within land system models, here exemplified by an agent-based model. Numerical experiments are conducted to examine an institution with two policies targeting the production of ecosystem services. We find a clear scope for simulation-based exploration of policy-making, with emergent processes including the marginal diminishing effect of economic policy interventions, asymmetric spill-over effects for different ecosystem services, and trade-offs between policy goals. The endogenous institutional model possesses the potential to reveal nuanced emergent patterns with important consequences for land systems.
... Limiting global warming below 2 • C (or better 1.5 • C) over preindustrial levels represents a major challenge calling for policies able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions far beyond current trends and national voluntary pledges [1,2]. Policies to achieve this outcome can be roughly classified as value-or behaviour-based [3]. ...
... Closely linked to the problems experienced in many nudging experiments is the fact that they estimate the effectiveness of environmental policies through self-reported measures of environmental attitudes or behaviour, usually based on batteries of questionnaire items [34]. 1 Measures of environmental attitudes in surveys are known to only weakly predict the behaviour reported in the same studies [19][20][21][22][23], with effects that can be remarkably different depending on the target behaviour and its cost [37,38]. Even worse, self-reported and actual behaviour does not necessarily match in real-world settings [9,10]. ...
The relationship between environmental attitudes and behaviour is known to be weak, especially when these variables are measured as self-report items in surveys. In addition many environmental questions are highly polarised, making it even more problematic to use survey data to inform policy making. To better explore the attitude-behaviour gap in the context of environmental policies, along with its interaction with partisan identity, we ran an online experiment with 805 U.S. residents. Four key variables-environmental attitudes, self-reported environmental behaviour, observed environmental behaviour (in the form of carbon-offset credit purchase), and partisan identity-were measured, and their interactions in promoting pro-environmental behaviour were analysed. We found that (1) self-reported and real behaviour are almost uncorrelated and (2) partisan identity mainly predicted self-reported not actual environmental behaviour. These results suggest that policy-making needs to rely more on behavioural insight to test policies' actual effects and to promote real improvement of the local and global environment.
... Conversely, socio-political and other soft constraints, while representing fewer fundamental barriers, may entirely rule out certain options. For example, inconsistencies and time-lags in the policy process could preclude achievement of some climate goals 24 . ...
Concerns of justice are rarely considered within feasibility assessments of climate mitigation policies, even when present conditions and climate action itself have serious implications for vulnerable populations, potentially undermining the desirability and eventual success of mitigation. Hence, we propose a feasibility and desirability assessment framework for future assessments to evaluate practicality and desirability-based constraints while accounting for recognitional, procedural, and distributional justice, increasing transparency within the climate policy process.
... Even under the most optimistic scenarios, decarbonization cannot occur quickly enough to mitigate climate inertia and delays caused by committed warming from previous emissions. There will be delayed impacts from existing warming (Samset et al. 2020;Brown et al. 2019), from cultural and political inertia, and from resistance from fossil fuel producers and other vested interests (Westervelt 2022;Brown et al. 2023). For example, fossil fuel investment in 2023 was more than double the levels required to achieve net zero emissions (NZE) by 2050 (IEA 2023a). ...
The international climate strategy is failing. Current policies will act too slowly to prevent rising temperatures from crossing critical climate tipping points. IPCC assessments underestimate the non-linear risks and catastrophic costs of overshooting Paris Agreement targets. Opponents of solar geoengineering cite concerns about moral hazard and other potential risks; however, at this juncture cooling interventions are the only feasible way to stop dangerous climate change. Worsening impacts will force many climate sceptics to address the crisis. They will increasingly support solar geoengineering, as these methods will allow global temperatures to be rapidly lowered without reducing emissions. Major powers are already researching climate geoengineering. In the near future one or more countries will almost inevitably deploy unilateral climate interventions to prevent increasingly extreme weather from causing massive crop failures and other deadly disasters. To forestall the unilateral deployment of untested technologies, an international program is urgently needed to research safe climate cooling methods and develop effective global governance. Solar geoengineering can reduce temperatures to safe levels, but will not stop rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases from acidifying the oceans and destroying critical marine ecosystems. Cooling interventions are imperative, but they must be used as supplements for existing strategies to reduce and remove greenhouse gases, not as substitutes. To ensure constructive outcomes, international dialogue and research must immediately begin on a new, viable climate strategy: supplementing greenhouse gas emission reduction and carbon dioxide removal with cooling interventions. There is no realistic alternative.
... However, unforeseen on-site conditions required schedule adjustments, and contingency plans or risk management strategies were not fully integrated into the process. To align with NLP principles, designs should include provisions for long-term maintenance, adaptive capacity to handle environmental changes, and collaboration with stakeholders to ensure feasibility and sustainability [84][85][86]. Incorporating risk management protocols and maintenance-focused designs can enhance the adaptability and resilience of the project while aligning with broader sustainability goals [87]. ...
Urban areas face increasing environmental challenges, including fine dust pollution and climate change, which significantly impact public health and urban resilience. To address these issues, this study explores the integration of Nature-based Solutions (NbSs) and landscape architecture processes to develop a systematic approach for enhancing urban environmental outcomes. Through a comprehensive review of prior studies, the strengths and weaknesses of NbSs and landscape architecture processes were analyzed, leading to the development of the Nature-based Landscape Process (NLP), which synthesizes the key principles of both approaches. The Dongmyeong Elementary School Fine Dust Mitigation Forest Project was analyzed as a case study to evaluate the applicability of the NLP. This project, implemented using traditional landscape processes, was critically reviewed to identify areas where NbS principles could enhance ecological, social, and functional outcomes. The findings highlight how the integration of NbS principles into landscape architecture processes can address existing gaps and improve project sustainability and precision. This study provides practical insights into the application of the NLP in urban landscape projects, contributing to the development of strategies that align with long-term sustainability and climate adaptation goals.
... Deep decarbonization targets require substantial interventions in the land system; that is, the promotion of extensive afforestation action in parallel with the current ban on logging in natural forests (Brown et al., 2019;Roe, 2019). However, this action is highly vulnerable to land policies (Fayet et al., 2022;Roe, 2019). ...
... The urban heat island phenomenon prevalent in many cities contributes to increased energy expenditures for cooling buildings. The research in [10] suggests potential energy savings ranging between 300 kWh and 1700 kWh for every 92 m 2 of naturalized surface compared to traditional pavement and asphalt. This estimation underscores the potential for mitigating the heat island effect by reducing air temperatures through strategies such as tree shading, reflective pavement, urban vegetation, and other natural systems. ...
This article proposes a conceptual model for integrating and categorizing urban projects aimed at achieving carbon neutrality. This model comprises five interconnected levers: energy efficiency, renewable energy production and consumption, electrification of end use, circular economy, and CO2 ensnaring (capture). Each lever encompasses projects and initiatives capable of directly or indirectly capturing urban CO2 and accelerating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. These levers are interlinked, providing a road map for constructing a coherent and sustainable municipal model. Referred to as the “5-E levers”, this conceptual framework derives its name from the fact that all levers begin with the letter “E”, facilitating memorization and dissemination among policymakers.
... Even under the most optimistic scenarios, decarbonization is not likely to occur quickly enough to mitigate the effects of system inertia and lags caused by factors including committed warming from previous emissions, the delayed impacts of existing warming (e.g., Samset et al., 2020;Brown et al., 2019), cultural and political inertia, and the resistance of fossil fuel producers and other vested interests (Michaelowa et al., 2018;Varadhan and Verma, 2023). For example, although there is no carbon budget left for building any more CO2 emitting power stations, vehicles and industrial facilities (Vaughan, 2018), fossil fuel subsidies are expected to rise from $5.9 trillion in 2020 to $6.4 trillion in 2025 (Parry et al., 2021). ...
Although the 2015 Paris Agreement climate targets seem certain to be missed, only a few experts are questioning the adequacy of the current approach to limiting climate change and suggesting that additional approaches are needed to avoid unacceptable catastrophes. This article posits that selective science communication and unrealistically optimistic assumptions are obscuring the reality that greenhouse gas emissions reduction and carbon dioxide removal will not prevent climate change in the 21st Century. It also explains how overly pessimistic and speculative criticisms are behind opposition to considering potential climate cooling interventions as a complementary approach for mitigating dangerous warming. There is little evidence supporting assertions that: current greenhouse gas emissions reduction and removal methods can and will be ramped up in time to prevent dangerous climate change; overshoot of Paris Agreement targets will be temporary; net zero emissions will produce a safe, stable climate; the impacts of overshoot can be managed and reversed; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models and assessments capture the full scope of prospective disastrous impacts; and the risks of climate interventions are greater than the risks of inaction. These largely unsupported assumptions distort risk assessments and discount the urgent need to develop a viable mitigation strategy. Owing to political pressures, many critical scientific concerns are ignored or preemptively dismissed in international negotiations. As a result, the present and growing crisis and the level of effort and time that will be required to control and rebalance the climate are severely underestimated. The paper concludes by outlining the key elements of a realistic policy approach that would augment current efforts to constrain dangerous warming by supplementing current mitigation approaches with climate cooling interventions.
... Yet, current realities fail to live up to this aspiration. For example, nations' inabilities to commit to the climate agenda is reflected in the failure of the Paris Agreement (Brown et al., 2019). ...
The world's economies face acute anthropocentric challenges. We are witnessing significant structural disruption, driven by an urgent need to redress a historical focus on unchecked economic growth and unequal access to resources, requiring seismic transformations of our economic, social, and educational systems. Debate about sustainable development is becoming less controversial. Yet, many countries still struggle to commit to action. Whist political leaders engage in commendable discussion on sustainable practices, impacts range from rhetoric to constrained solutions. Our socioeconomic and environmental challenges require collective effort, as we witness a contestation of development models that omit environmental preservation, lack inclusivity and compromise future generations. In this context, in which we seek alternative models that are more applicable to reality, education emerges as a driving force for change. Education already plays a role in the design of the socio-political economy. So, thoughtfully designed, it can help to define our understanding of sustainability beyond political and economic selection of goals and self-serving dimensions. Given transformative character, education can help to bridge the need for an inclusive and sustainable economic development model. Through an economic lens, this paper offers critical and reflective insights into how education can contribute to the necessary transformation for the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We argue that, with the right changes, education and economic development can be synergistic in pursuit of circularity, thereby meeting the requirements for just and equitable access, and preventing the depletion of natural resources needed for a thriving and flourishing humanity.
... We should recall long-standing logics for delaying decarbonization through such "time-buying" or "bridging" strategies in assessments and policy (Carton et al., 2020;Low and Boettcher, 2020)see also 3.4 Adaptiveness and Reflection. Emphasis on CDR may lead to less ambition in emissions reductions, as well as dubious expectations of carbon removal that are unlikely to materialise or be reliable if they do (Brown et al., 2019). Research might examine how CDR approaches are built into already-convoluted national commitments and carbon accounting (Dooley and Gupta, 2017). ...
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) – the creation, enhancement, and upscaling of carbon sinks – has become a pillar of national and corporate commitments towards Net Zero emissions, as well as pathways towards realizing the Paris Agreement’s ambitious temperature targets. In this perspective, we explore CDR as an emerging issue of Earth System Governance (ESG). We draw on the results of a workshop at the 2022 Earth System Governance conference that mapped a range of actors, activities, and issues relevant to carbon removal, and refined them into research questions spanning four intersecting areas: modeling and systems assessment, societal appraisal, policy, and innovation and industry. We filter these questions through the five lenses of the ESG framework and highlight several key ‘cross-cutting’ issues that could form the basis of an integrated ESG research agenda on
CDR.
... Global agreements have been reached about how countries must mitigate the effects of climate change. Brown, Alexander, Arneth, Holman, and Rounsevell (2019) contend that 195 countries agreed on climate change adaptation, mitigation, and finance in light of the damaging effects of greenhouse gas emissions and their contribution to global warming. It was done through the auspices of the Paris Agreement to ensure that the temperatures do not rise to above 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050 (Meinshausen et al., 2022). ...
The main aim of this study is to develop an unweighted climate risk disclosure index to assess whether climate risk disclosure predicts mining companies’ performance.The catastrophic nature of climate risk has become more topical in recent years. Yet, academic research efforts have been directed to climate risk from the perspective of developed economies only and very little is understood about it in developing economies. 216 firm observations in mining sector for the period covering 2016 through 2021 were analysed using descriptive statistics and estimated generalised least square with period seemingly unrelated regression. The results suggest that the climate risk disclosure is significant in predicting company performance as proxied by earnings per share (EPS), economic value added (EVA) and return on equity (ROE). Policy makers and regulators should encourage companies to intensify climate risk disclosure so as to maximise value and benefit relevant stakeholders. The study contributes to the ongoing debates on climate risk by focusing on extractive industry, mining sector in a developed economy setting. Methodologically, the study developed an unweighted disclosure checklist that can guide companies on pertinent climate risk issues to disclose.
... Some authors point to the potential for land-use competition from large-scale negative emissions programmes (Benton et al., 2018;Bradshaw et al., 2013;Brown et al., 2019;Seddon et al., 2021;Zomer et al., 2008). Climate change itself is expected to reduce the available arable land (Zhang & Cai, 2011), while the occurrence of conflicts that interrupt food supply, such as the war in Ukraine (Jagtap et al., 2022), are even less predictable. ...
Large quantities of 'negative emissions' will be required to meet the 1.5°C temperature target under the Paris agreement. As nations consider more ambitious emissions reductions goals, policy makers, carbon market participants and environmental advocates need to estimate the potential scale of nature-based climate solutions (NCS), against the opportunity cost of current land use. In this study we construct a simple linear regression model of the relationship between carbon abatement potential and agricultural profitability, the latter a proxy for opportunity cost, to describe the total set of options for NCS on the Australian continent. Sampling these same two variables at the sites of over 800 land-based offset projects accredited since 2015 shows how the market selected from these abatement options. The model demonstrates that offset projects, under a range of crediting methodologies, were typically selected where the ratio of abatement potential to opportunity cost is maximized. These results, produced from two readily available spatial variables, provide an empirically derived framework for those with an interest in the structure of the long-run supply curve for land-based carbon abatement. This modelling approach could be applied in any geographic region where similar spatial variables for agricultural profitability and abatement potential are available. Key policy insights:. We find a strong positive correlation between the quantity of abatement potential on a land parcel and its potential opportunity cost, the latter represented by agricultural profitability.. The lowest cost abatement will be obtained by policies, including market mechanisms, that optimize these two factors rather than prioritizing one over the other.. Policies that direct projects to 'marginal' agricultural land may lead to a more costly emissions reduction pathway.. Our modelling approach is a key input to the development of a long-run supply curve for land-based abatement, essential to any strategy that relies heavily on negative emissions.. Understanding the drivers of land-based abatement projects can help to predict the land use policy impacts of a higher offset requirement. ARTICLE HISTORY
... The key to increasing agricultural productivity in developing countries and to reducing potential negative externalities is the development and dissemination of sustainable practices (C. Brown, 2019). A fundamental transformation is being experienced by the traditional approach to the food industry. ...
Advances in technology in communication currently have a significant change throughout all sectors. Agriculture especially in Indonesia has a big potential to apply this 4.0 technology that will drive a significant output and productivity in crops production. The world’s population is projected to rise from 7.4 billion currently to 8.1 billion in 2025, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. The UN food agency’s latest annual agricultural outlook, produced alongside the OECD, forecast that 80% of the increase in crop output needed to feed this population would come from yield improvements. The main idea of this paper is twofold: the first one is to Understand how agriculture 4.0 could take place and improve the productivity of a crops production with a descriptive approach. And the second one is to Understand what the gaps of Indonesia as 3rd are ranked rice producer in the world to deploy the agriculture 4.0
... Accordingly, the implementation of carbon capture projects must be informed by realistic system-or context-specific prescriptions, which we currently lack. For example, there is insufficient regional differentiation of socioecological histories and conflicts, which can amplify climate change (e.g., Berhe 2022), and recommendation of best practices for managed and unmanaged systems, where time lags in carbon-climate feedbacks can make it difficult to discern the benefits and costs of carbon capture projects (e.g., Brown et al. 2019). ...
The unfolding climate crisis is in many respects a human issue, one caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere, and that can only be solved through a concerted effort across all sectors of society. In this prospective synthesis, I explain how expanding the scope of biogeochemical research would lead to a more rigorous and impactful climate change mitigation and adaptation agenda. Focusing on biogeochemistry as an area of interdisciplinary convergence, I review theories and empirical studies in the environmental and social sciences, to distill five principles and three phases of implementation for sustainable carbon capture projects. I discuss how land conservation, management, and restoration might be coordinated to prepare for climate change and to achieve multiple social and ecological benefits, including enhanced carbon drawdown and permanence on land. On the conservation front, the abundance of threatened plant and animal species spatially correlates with the distribution of carbon- and water-rich habitats within and across key regions, which can be prioritized for biodiversity protection with major climatic benefits. On the management front, long-term records of socioecological change warrant a revision of current models for sustainable forestry and agriculture in favor of decentralized system-specific prescriptions, including interventions where organic or inorganic carbon capture may improve wood and food production under future climate scenarios. On the restoration front, experiments in degraded landscapes reveal mechanisms of carbon stabilization, such as iron-coordination of organic complexes, which amplify the benefits of ecological succession and lead to carbon accumulation beyond thresholds predicted for undisturbed ecosystems. These examples illustrate the potential for innovation at the intersection of basic and applied biogeoscience, which could accelerate atmospheric carbon capture through new discoveries and collective action.
... Large-scale land acquisitions by significant investors do not always meet an entire population's needs, as the local availability of a critical food production factor may deteriorate due to the land acquisition (Marselis et al. 2017). Given the impending depletion of agricultural land resources, the urgency of effective agricultural land management appears even greater today (Vermeulen et al. 2018;Brown et al. 2019). Agricultural landscapes have been transformed over the last five decades as a result of economic and social development (Lambin & Geist 2003;Walker 2004;Wright 2005;. ...
Canggu Village is primarily a development zone with the potential for rapid growth. Canggu possesses tourism potential as well as ecological conditions conducive to future growth. The rapid growth of the population, followed by development activities, will increase demand for space, particularly in areas with a high strategic value of land, such as tourism areas. Tourism is still regarded as a stimulant to the economy. However, if space development is not adequately managed and controlled, it will affect the conversion of land functions, particularly agricultural land, into built-up areas for commercialization. A study effort is required to map the characteristics and deviation patterns of agricultural land use in Canggu to achieve spatial order. By mapping the characteristics and deviation patterns of agricultural land use in Canggu Village, it is hoped that appropriate actions or solutions to Canggu Village's ecological problems can be compiled and developed.
... In actual situations, the properties of the plots and the interactions between different land uses are different in space and time, but the current research lacks an in-depth discussion on this [106]. On the one hand, it is necessary to improve the assessment of the time lag inherent in developing land system policies, management changes, and feedback dynamics [107]. On the other hand, the temporal variability and accumulation of landrelated parameters need to be fully understood and quantified, and a spatial configuration model over time should be constructed [108]. ...
Due to high-intensity human disturbance and rapid climate change, optimizing the spatial pattern of land use has become a pivotal path to restoring ecosystem functions and realizing the sustainable development of human–land relationships. This review uses the literature analysis method combined with CiteSpace to determine current research progress and frontiers, challenges, and directions for further improvement in this field. The main conclusions include the following: (a) research on the optimization of spatial pattern of land use has transformed from pattern description orientation to sustainable development orientation to ecological restoration orientation. Its research paradigm has changed from pattern to function to well-being; (b) the research frontier mainly includes spatial pattern of land use that takes into account the unity of spatial structure and functional attributes, the ecological mechanism and feedback effect of change in spatial pattern of land, the theoretical framework and model construction of land use simulation and prediction based on multiple disciplines and fields, and the adaptive management of sustainable land use in the context of climate change; (c) based on current research challenges, we integrate the research on landscape ecology and ecosystem service flows to develop an “element sets–network structure–system functions–human well-being” conceptual model. We also propose the strengthening of future research on theoretical innovation, spatiotemporal mechanism selection, causal emergence mechanism, the transformation threshold, and uncertainty. We provide innovative ideas for achieving sustainable management of land systems and territorial spatial planning with the aim of improving the adaptability of land use spatial optimization. This is expected to strengthen the ability of land systems to cope with ecological security and climate risks.
... Global temperatures are expected to increase approximately 0.2°C per decade over the next thirty years, and this rise in temperature is forecasted to affect crop productivity (Bailey-Serres et al. 2019). Reduction in freshwater availability and shrinking of biodiversity have already altered crop growth as exemplified by yield reduction in affected regions (Keesing et al. 2010;Brown et al. 2019). Such changes are not uniformly distributed around the world. ...
Brassica species were domesticated as oil producing crops during different periods at many sites throughout the world. Animal fat being pricier, the poor used vegetable oil as a source of their nutrition. Accordingly, world production of vegetable oil has been incremental chiefly due to increased production of soybean, palm and oilseed rape. Rapeseed (Brassica napus L.), also known as Canola or Oilseed rape, has thus become an important source of vegetable oil worldwide, and ranks third after soybean and palm. The world population is expected to cross the 9 billion mark by 2050, and to assure food and nutritional security for our soaring future generations, we need to necessarily double the production of food crops by then. However, various environmental stresses negate the realization of this target. Rapeseed thrives very well in countries of the northern hemisphere of the planet having cool and humid climates, making it a very important oil- and protein-crop, since no other crop can produce such high yields of both oil and protein under these climatic conditions. In the coming decades, it has the potential of achieving the rank numero uno as the cheapest source of nutritious vegetable oil for the impoverished of the world. Nevertheless, it is prone to various abiotic stresses which not only affect normal growth rate of the plant but also decrease crop productivity by alarming proportions. It is, therefore, imperative to develop new stress tolerant varieties having higher productivity and better adaptation to the abiotic stresses abounding because of climate change. This chapter summarizes the various abiotic stresses afflicting rapeseed; the classical, genetic and molecular approaches that have been employed for breeding for abiotic stress tolerance, together with biotechnological and synthetic biology research breakthroughs aimed at creating abiotic stress-resistant climate-resilient varieties. The combination of classical and molecular breeding, being assisted by integrated omics and genome editing breakthroughs, can lead to speed up breeding of the crop and alter the rate of production of rapeseed worldwide, making it feasible to achieve the target of being number one in meeting the demands for vegetable oil of a soaring population.Keywords
Brassica napus
Oilseed rapeRapeseedCanolaAbiotic stressTemperature stressDrought stressSalt stress
... Global temperatures are expected to increase approximately 0.2°C per decade over the next thirty years, and this rise in temperature is forecasted to affect crop productivity (Bailey-Serres et al. 2019). Reduction in freshwater availability and shrinking of biodiversity have already altered crop growth as exemplified by yield reduction in affected regions (Keesing et al. 2010;Brown et al. 2019). Such changes are not uniformly distributed around the world. ...
Castor, Ricinus communis, is one of the top ten oil crops in the world. It has been paid more and more attention because of its high economic value. In the process of growth and development, it is subjected to a variety of abiotic stresses from the environment. In this chapter, the stresses on castor are discussed in consideration of heat tolerances, cold tolerance, drought tolerance, flooding and submergence tolerance, nutrient use efficiency, water use efficiency, salt-alkali stress and metal ion toxicity. It is suggested that more attention should be paid to the physiological adaptation mechanisms of castor to these stresses.
... Technological advances such as soil improvement, agricultural mechanization, and genetic improvement of crops can trigger profound and rapid changes in the way land is used and the spatial distribution of land uses (28). Complex interactions driven by positive feedbacks can lead to abrupt changes, while negative feedbacks and time lags can strongly hinder or slow other land system changes, creating stability that can be desirable or undesirable (30). Examples of negative feedbacks are poverty traps that maintain households in low agricultural productivity systems (31,32) or public subsidies that may improve resilience of agriculture to market (commodity price volatility) or environmental (e.g., extreme weather events) stressors and shocks but may also hinder needed systemic transformations (33). ...
Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits—"win–wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.
... Even though advancements in crop sciences improved agricultural yields, the rate of demanddriven by a swelling population with a penchant for animal-source foodsis projected to exceed both the rate of crop production 92 , as well as the rate of agricultural intensification. 93,94,95 The necessity to substantially improve the system of agriculture features in literature often 96,97 , and yet, yields intensificationa "more of the same" approachcontinues to serve the foremost strategy to ensure food security. 98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109 To prevent global catastrophic risks (GCRs) and humanitarian crises, systemic interventions should be reevaluated, and the system of agriculture overhauled. ...
The global system of food and agriculture is constrained by finite resources, it is prone to operational instability, it fails to prevent famine and micronutrient deficiencies, and it is a prime contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and ecosystems collapse. If left unattended, the system may engender further global catastrophic risks (GCRs). However, interventions employed by the food science, technology and policy communities are ineffective, if not counterproductive. Incremental modifications to the system will neither achieve food security nor avoid ecological degradation. This paper draws on primary and secondary sources, expert interviews and system dynamics models, to analyze and illustrate how the food system is organized and functions in self-undermining, self-debilitating dynamics, disrupting yields and supply chains, and resulting in GCRs. Based on this analysis, and informed by system dynamics literature, a set of interventions is proposed with the potential to mitigate the triple ecological-nutritional-social risks engendered by modern food and agriculture.
... The effects of climate change include the increase in average temperature of the earth as well as extreme weather events both in terms of their frequency and severity (Field et al. 2012). Many studies suggest that the target to limit global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C is very unlikely to be achieved (Brown et al. 2019;Davis et al. 2010;Raftery et al. 2017). Thus, the call for adaptation efforts has been increasing in recognition of a changing climate, a continuing rise in greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, and a severe setback in mitigating GHG emissions (de Coninck et al. 2018). ...
Road infrastructure is engineered to perform through constant exposure to climatological stressors. Due to climate change in particular, expected rises in the average ambient and extreme temperatures, pavement performance might deviate from what was originally predicted at the design stage. This poses serious risks to the long-term performance of this infrastructure because the capacity of a transportation network to provide an acceptable level of service over the period that it was intended for is also seriously affected. However , identifying where potential risks are greatest and where more involved planning and prioritizing is needed is hampered by the lack of vulnerability assessment methods that appropriately integrate failure pathways and engineering decisions. In this study, a new vulnerability index is proposed-extent of pavement grade reliability loss (E PGRL), which has the capacity to capture both flexible pavement performance and transportation serviceability. The index is based on two assumptions. First, flexible pavement performance is directly related to the inherent rheological properties of the asphalt binder, which can be estimated from the performance binder grade requirements for a locale. Second, the level of service of a road network can be represented by its connectivity, expressed here by a network centrality measure, the betweenness score. Two developing countries, Colombia and India, were selected to analyze the capabilities of the E PGRL. The results obtained indicate the E PGRL captures the available performance capability of pavement infrastructure together with the importance of transportation network elements. Hence, it can be used as a tool to evaluate and quantify the vulnerability of transportation infrastructure to future climate change.
... This realisation is strengthened by the acknowledgement that many mitigation measures taken by participating countries are inevitably subject to implementation delays. This means it is even more unlikely the Paris agreement can be reached with mitigation strategies alone (Brown et al., 2019). ...
Public policy institutions play crucial roles in the land system, but modelling their policy-making processes is challenging. Large language models (LLMs) offer a novel approach to simulating many different types of human decision-making, including policy choices. This paper aims to investigate the opportunities and challenges that LLMs bring to land system modelling by integrating LLM-powered institutional agents within an agent-based land use model. Four types of LLM agents are examined, all of which, in the examples presented here, use taxes to steer meat production toward a target level. The LLM agents provide simulated reasoning and policy action output. The agents' performance is benchmarked against two baseline scenarios: one without policy interventions and another implementing optimal policy actions determined through a genetic algorithm. The findings show that, while LLM agents perform better than the non-intervention scenario, they fall short of the performance achieved by optimal policy actions. However, LLM agents demonstrate behaviour and decision-making, marked by policy consistency and transparent reasoning. This includes generating strategies such as incrementalism, delayed policy action, proactive policy adjustments, and balancing multiple stakeholder interests. Agents equipped with experiential learning capabilities excel in achieving policy objectives through progressive policy actions. The order in which reasoning and proposed policy actions are output has a notable effect on the agents' performance, suggesting that enforced reasoning both guides and explains LLM decisions. The approach presented here points to promising opportunities and significant challenges. The opportunities include, exploring naturalistic institutional decision-making, handling massive institutional documents, and human–AI cooperation. Challenges mainly lie in the scalability, interpretability, and reliability of LLMs.
This article explores the complex relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, focusing on three levels: computing-related, immediate, and system-level consequences. It highlights the potential of AI in climate-related industries, such as climate change monitoring, data collection, predictive analysis, risk assessment, and energy efficiency optimization. However, ethical issues such as fair access to AI technology, algorithmic biases, and environmental transparency need to be addressed. The article emphasizes the need for robust regulatory frameworks to govern ethical AI usage in climate-related applications, guided by ongoing research. AI can transform climate action through climate modelling, simulation accuracy, weather forecasting, and energy efficiency optimization. Responsible AI deployment with clear ethical norms can help combat global climate change. The article concludes that AI should be included in climate projects while considering its ethical and environmental implications.
Comprehensive data on the costs of climate change mitigation are needed to direct the scale and distribution of climate finance to the sectors and regions where it will be most cost effective. We estimate finance needed to achieve regional forest-based mitigation targets aggregated from Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement, submitted between 2015 - 2021. We compare the costs of achieving these regional targets to a Global Coordination scenario in which a similar level of finance is available as is required to meet upper bound NDC targets, but which allows mitigation to occur in regions where it is lowest cost. We find that regions accounting for 70% of global forest carbon stocks can meet or exceed their forest-based NDC targets with carbon prices less than 28-70 billion annually by 2030. Under a Global Coordination scenario, we project nearly 3x the quantity of mitigation as in the upper bound NDC scenario, under similar levels of investment, in 2030. These findings demonstrate an opportunity for increasing mitigation action among regions with low-cost abatement potential that is not reflected in current NDCs, as well as substantial cost savings via policy solutions that target low-cost mitigation opportunities. This assessment provides insight into the magnitude and distribution of forest climate finance needed to reach current mitigation targets and informs the development of the next generation of NDCs.
The extensive loss of carbon-rich, species-rich grasslands to agriculture and development has had detrimental impacts on wildflower abundance and diversity. Therefore, conversion of verges, lawns, and fields into wildflower meadows (WFMs) has gained prominence in recent years. However, a frequent recommendation for WFM establishment is to reduce soil fertility, raising concerns regarding the impact on carbon sequestration. To address the question of how WFM conversion might affect soil carbon retention, an experiment was conducted in Surrey, UK, converting grassland into WFM using different strategies: deturfing or scarifying, plus seed sowing. Measurements included earthworm abundance, live biomass, and microbial decomposition rates via a cotton strip assay (CSA), to provide insights into the initial phase of carbon sequestration: organic matter decomposition. The findings unveiled critical insights. In the short term, WFM conversion resulted in reduced earthworm populations relative to the control, especially when the conversion involved a high level of disturbance by removing turf. Conversely, mowing led to increased earthworm populations and accelerated CSA decomposition compared to the control. These findings suggest that the effects of disturbance and removal of biomass through deturfing or scarifying, and the energy supply provided by mowing and leaving the arisings, had more impact on the earthworm population and CSA decomposition than the increased diversity of the sown wildflowers. Successful WFM establishment can be achieved without turf removal, a practice that exerts adverse effects on soil life. These findings have broader implications for grassland resource management in the context of climate change mitigation through soil carbon storage.
The tomato is a fruit vegetable rich in nutritional and medicinal value grown in greenhouses and fields worldwide. It is severely sensitive to heat stress, which frequently occurs with rising global warming. Predictions indicate a 0.2 °C increase in average surface temperatures per decade for the next three decades, which underlines the threat of austere heat stress in the future. Previous studies have reported that heat stress adversely affects tomato growth, limits nutrient availability, hammers photosynthesis, disrupts reproduction, denatures proteins, upsets signaling pathways, and damages cell membranes. The overproduction of reactive oxygen species in response to heat stress is toxic to tomato plants. The negative consequences of heat stress on the tomato have been the focus of much investigation, resulting in the emergence of several therapeutic interventions. However, a considerable distance remains to be covered to develop tomato varieties that are tolerant to current heat stress and durable in the perspective of increasing global warming. This current review provides a critical analysis of the heat stress consequences on the tomato in the context of global warming, its innate response to heat stress, and the elucidation of domains characterized by a scarcity of knowledge, along with potential avenues for enhancing sustainable tolerance against heat stress through the involvement of diverse advanced technologies. The particular mechanism underlying thermotolerance remains indeterminate and requires further elucidatory investigation. The precise roles and interplay of signaling pathways in response to heat stress remain unresolved. The etiology of tomato plants’ physiological and molecular responses against heat stress remains unexplained. Utilizing modern functional genomics techniques, including transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, can assist in identifying potential candidate proteins, metabolites, genes, gene networks, and signaling pathways contributing to tomato stress tolerance. Improving tomato tolerance against heat stress urges a comprehensive and combined strategy including modern techniques, the latest apparatuses, speedy breeding, physiology, and molecular markers to regulate their physiological, molecular, and biochemical reactions.
Land-based carbon removals, specifically afforestation/reforestation and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), vary widely in 1.5 °C and 2 °C scenarios generated by integrated assessment models. Because underlying drivers are difficult to assess, we use a well-known integrated assessment model, GCAM, to demonstrate that land-based carbon removals are sensitive to the strength and scope of land-based mitigation policies. We find that while cumulative afforestation/reforestation and BECCS deployment are inversely related, they are both typically part of cost-effective mitigation pathways, with forestry options deployed earlier. While the CO2 removal intensity (removal per unit land) of BECCS is typically higher than afforestation/reforestation over long time horizons, the BECCS removal intensity is sensitive to feedstock and technology choices whereas the afforestation/reforestation removal intensity is sensitive to land policy choices. Finally, we find a generally positive relationship between agricultural prices and removal effectiveness of land-based mitigation, suggesting that some trade-offs may be difficult to avoid.
Solar geoengineering (SGE) can combat climate change by directly reducing temperatures. Both SGE and the climate itself are surrounded by great uncertainties. Implementing SGE affects learning about these uncertainties. We model endogenous learning over two uncertainties: the sensitivity of temperatures to carbon concentrations (the climate sensitivity), and the effectiveness of SGE in lowering temperatures. We present both theoretical and simulation results from an integrated assessment model, focusing on the informational value of SGE experimentation. Surprisingly, under current calibrated conditions, SGE deployment slows learning, causing a less informed decision. For any reasonably sized experimental SGE deployment, the temperature change becomes closer to zero, and thus more obscured by noisy weather shocks. Still, some SGE use is optimal despite, not because of, its informational value. The optimal amount of SGE is very sensitive to beliefs about both uncertainties.
Replacing coal energy with biomass energy in power plants is important in reducing air pollutants and CO2 emissions in China. We first calculated the optimal economic transport radius (OETR) to evaluate the optimally available biomass (OAB) and the potentially available biomass (PAB) for the year 2018. The OAB and PAB of power plants are estimated to be 423-1013 Mt, with higher values found in the provinces with higher population and crop yields. Unlike crop and forestry residue, the PAB can access to OAB for waste, mainly because the waste is easier to collect and transfer to a power plant. When all the PAB were consumed, the NOx, SO2, PM10, PM2.5, and CO2 emissions would decrease by 41.7 kt, 115.3 kt, 117.6 kt, 26.0 kt, and 701.2 Mt, respectively. The scenario analysis results showed that the PAB will not be sufficient to meet the biomass power growth estimated for 2040, 2035, and 2030 under the baseline scenario (BS), policy scenario (PS), and reinforcement scenario (RS), respectively, whereas the CO2 emission will dramatically decrease by 1473 Mt in 2040 under the BS, 1271 Mt in 2035 under the PS, and 1096 Mt in 2030 under the RS. Our findings indicate that the abundant biomass resources in China will bring significant co-benefits, reducing air pollutants and CO2 emissions, if biomass energy can be applied in power plants. Furthermore, more advanced technologies, such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), are expected to be used in power plants in the future, which will probably result in significantly lower CO2 emissions and promote the achievement of the CO2 emission peaking target and carbon neutrality. Our results provide useful information for developing a strategy for the coordinated reduction of air pollutants and CO2 emissions from power plants.
With time, the world is concerned about environmental protection and climate change, so policymakers and researchers focus on green finance. We investigate the role of green finance, GDP, trade openness, and foreign direct investment on environmental sustainability in Pakistan from the period from 1980 to 2020. By applying the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) we find that green finance, GDP, and foreign direct investment are a positive and significant relationship with environmental sustainability while trade openness is a negative and insignificant effect on environmental sustainability. According to the theory of the environmental Kuznets curve, a model of environmental sustainability is developed.
The energy transition process calls for striving interventions towards low-carbon technologies. While their deployment is expected to drive down greenhouse gases emissions, it is expected to bring along intense critical materials exploitation. This article presents a quantitative framework to assess the impact of energy transition pathways in terms of raw materials extraction, coupling Input-Output models with energy modelling methodologies, defined as Dynamic Extraction and Recycling Input-Output framework (DYNERIO). The framework is analytically formalized and tested through a conceptual two-regions example based on EXIOBASE dataset. DYNERIO is composed by three modules: an environmentally-extended Multi-Regional Input-Output model assesses the demand of energy carriers based on exogenously defined final demand of commodities in future scenarios; an energy optimization model quantifies the time-evolution of the technology capacity stocks needed to satisfy such demand; finally, a third module quantifies the amount of materials demanded, recycled and extracted by each region to manufacture the capacity requirements.
Sustainable food systems are essential to ensure food security and mitigate climate change. Adaptation to climate change is part and parcel of sustainable food systems. Prior literature merely documented the climate-smart agricultural practices and explored the relationship with food security of adopters without taking the period of the strategies into account. Therefore, this study explored the factors affecting sustainable adaptation to climate change and created a further link between sustainable adaptation to climate change and the food security of rural households. The cross-sectional data were collected from 384 farmers through a face-to-face survey in Pakistan, selected by a multistage random sampling method. An ordered probit model and propensity score matching technique were used to analyze the data. Education, farm size, credit access, extension services, internet use for agriculture information, women's participation in farm-related decision making, and considering climate change a significant problem for agriculture were all positively influencing the sustainable adaptation to climate change at farms. The results indicated that farmers with a higher level of sustainable adaptation to climate change consumed more diversified diets and more daily calories as compared to those with a lower level of sustainable adaptation. Similarly, farmers with a lower level of sustainable adaptation to climate change had significantly lower food security than farmers with a high level of sustainable adaptation at their farms. This research indicated that farmers can gain food and nutrition benefits by becoming more sustainable adapters to climate change. This study has important policy implications for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) of zero hunger (SDG 2) and climate action (SDG 13) in developing countries.
The concept of environmental violence (EV) explains the harm that humanity is inflicting upon itself through our pollution emissions. This book argues that EV is present, active, and expanding at alarming rates in the contemporary human niche and in the Earth system. It explains how EV is produced and facilitated by the same inequalities that it creates and reinforces, and suggests that the causes can be attributed to a relatively small portion of the human population and to a fairly circumscribed set of behaviours. While the causes of EV are complex, the author makes this complexity manageable to ensure interventions are more readily discernible. The EV-model developed is both a theoretical concept and an analytical tool, substantiated with rigorous social and environmental scientific evidence, and designed with the intention to help disrupt the cycle of violence with effective policies and real change.
Landscape fire regimes are created through socio-ecological processes, yet in current global models the representation of anthropogenic impacts on fire regimes is restricted to simplistic functions derived from coarse measures such as GDP and population density. As a result, fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) have limited ability to reproduce observed patterns of fire, and limited prognostic value. At the heart of this challenge is a failure to represent human agency and decision-making related to fire. This paper outlines progress towards a global behavioural model that captures the categorical differences in human fire use and management that arise from diverse land use objectives under varying socio-ecological contexts. We present a modelled global spatiotemporal distribution of what we term ‘land-fire systems’ (LFSs), a classification that combines land use systems and anthropogenic fire regimes. Our model simulates competition between LFSs with a novel bootstrapped classification tree approach that performs favourably against reference multinomial regressions. We evaluate model outputs with the human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) framework and find good overall agreement. We discuss limitations to our methods, as well as remaining challenges to the integration of behavioural modelling in DGVMs and associated model-intercomparison protocols.
Agriculture has the great potential to make a substantial contribution to net-zero emissions progress. This chapter conducts a comprehensive review of the literature on the strategies for agricultural carbon sequestration and GHG emissions reductions and their economic feasibility. A general lesson from this review is that carbon sequestration and GHG emissions reductions in agriculture is potentially attractive, depending on the environmental conditions, socioeconomic contexts and strategies analysed. Various agricultural strategies have been identified as appropriate measures to increase carbon sequestration and/or reduce GHG emissions, including conservation tillage, crop rotations, continuous cropping, residue retention, improved fertilisation, and afforestation. Adopting conservative tillage and continuous cropping might be economically feasible, while the economic feasibility for crop rotations varies across regions. Studies on the economic feasibility of improved fertilisation and residue retention provide mixed findings. The economic variable costs of afforestation in developing countries are relatively lower than the costs in developed countries. More considerations of co-benefits should be integrated into relevant climate policies. We need to further improve our recognition and understanding of the policy-making of agricultural climate policies, thereby substantially increasing their effectiveness and robustness.
Background
The natural removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through land conservation, restoration, and management is receiving increasing attention as a scalable approach for climate change mitigation. However, different land-use sectors compete for resources and incentives within and across geopolitical regions, resulting in divergent goals and inefficient prioritization of CO2 removal efforts. Thus, a unifying framework is needed to accelerate basic research and coordinated interventions to accelerate climate change mitigation.
Scope
We propose a generalizable framework for Enhanced Natural Climate Solutions (NCS +), which we define as activities that can be coordinated to increase carbon drawdown and permanence on land while improving livelihoods and the provision of natural resources in vulnerable communities and ecosystems. The framework builds on interdisciplinary scientific convergence, including critical socioecological interactions, to inform both top-down policy incentives and bottom-up adoption by industries and managers. To achieve this goal, we suggest a multi-tiered approach for the prioritization of projects at local to regional scales that would simultaneously accelerate scientific discovery and broad implementation of CO2 removal projects.
Conclusions
Our vision leverages input from hundreds of researchers and land managers, including social and environmental scientists as well as representatives from tribal governments, state, and federal agencies in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, as a model system. Five guiding principles orient the framework which would be applicable in any region. As evidence of feasibility, we provide a synthesis of interdisciplinary studies that illustrate how coordinated action, with explicit consideration of system-specific technical and socioecological limitations, can lead to scalable projects with multiple co-benefits. Using theory as a linchpin for innovation, we propose that NCS + could better align climate change mitigation, adaptation, and justice goals at multiple scales.
Flax is a self-pollinated crop widely cultivated for fiber and oilseed
production. Poor rooting system architecture and abiotic stresses such as drought, extreme temperature, salt, and cadmium accumulation can significantly affect the growth of flax, resulting in severe production losses. As such, improving the root system of flax cultivars and increasing their resistance or tolerance to abiotic stresses are important to achieve sustainable flax production. In recent years, substantial progress has been made towards the generation of flax genomic resources. Reduced cost of high-throughput sequencing has fueled the large-scale production of sequence data, allowing an intensification in the genotyping of numerous populations for quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping. Advanced genome-wide association studies (GWAS) combined with candidate gene identification through bioinformatics approaches make it possible to identify many large- and small-effect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) and candidate genes associated with agronomically important traits. To date, a total of 521 QTLs associated with abiotic stress-related traits have been identified in flax. These QTLs constitute markers for genomic selection (GS) to predict breeding values of populations under selection; the goals being to improve the accuracy and efficiency of selection, reduce cost, and shorten the breeding cycles. Combined with genetic simulation, this GS strategy offers a new, effective approach to predict the breeding performance of crosses and evaluate parents based on their genotype. Here we provide an overview of genomewide QTL mapping, gene family
identification, and outline the potential of a combined GS strategy with genetic simulation for breeding improvement of abiotic stress tolerance in flax.
This study explores the feasibility of options to step up EU action against deforestation. Its results are presented in two reports: 'Part I: Background analysis and setting
the scene: scale and trends of global deforestation and assessment of EU contribution'
and 'Part II: A potential EU initiative on deforestation: possible interventions'. Part I
analyses recent global and regional trends in deforestation and the linkages with the
production and consumption of twelve key Forest Risk Commodities, with a focus on
the role of the EU and its impacts. Further, the study reviews relevant EU policies, legislation and initiatives and ongoing international and regional efforts by private sector,
governments and civil society. Building on the analytical insights gained in Part I, the
Part II report makes suggestions on the framing of a possible EU initiative to tackle
deforestation and its root causes and drivers. This includes specific objectives and a
range of potential EU interventions tackling different dimension of the problem (supply
and demand side drivers, as well as the role of finance & investments). All identified
interventions are assessed against a shared set of assessment criteria: feasibility and
effectiveness; political acceptance, technical complexity; and administrative costs.
Given the complexity of the problem, any potential EU initiative should consider a
package of interventions which addresses the supply, demand and finance dimensions,
building on and reinforcing existing EU action as well as government and private sector commitments on zero deforestation and other relevant international initiatives.
Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere – the “global carbon budget” – is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land use and land-use change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land use and land-use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly and its growth rate (GATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN) and terrestrial CO2 sink (SLAND) are estimated with global process models constrained by observations. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (BIM), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the last decade available (2008–2017), EFF was 9.4±0.5 GtC yr-1, ELUC1.5±0.7 GtC yr-1, GATM4.7±0.02 GtC yr-1, SOCEAN2.4±0.5 GtC yr-1, and SLAND3.2±0.8 GtC yr-1, with a budget imbalance BIM of 0.5 GtC yr-1 indicating overestimated emissions and/or underestimated sinks. For the year 2017 alone, the growth in EFF was about 1.6 % and emissions increased to 9.9±0.5 GtC yr-1. Also for 2017, ELUC was 1.4±0.7 GtC yr-1, GATM was 4.6±0.2 GtC yr-1, SOCEAN was 2.5±0.5 GtC yr-1, and SLAND was 3.8±0.8 GtC yr-1, with a BIM of 0.3 GtC. The global atmospheric CO2 concentration reached 405.0±0.1 ppm averaged over 2017. For 2018, preliminary data for the first 6–9 months indicate a renewed growth in EFF of +2.7 % (range of 1.8 % to 3.7 %) based on national emission projections for China, the US, the EU, and India and projections of gross domestic product corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the economy for the rest of the world. The analysis presented here shows that the mean and trend in the five components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period of 1959–2017, but discrepancies of up to 1 GtC yr-1 persist for the representation of semi-decadal variability in CO2 fluxes. A detailed comparison among individual estimates and the introduction of a broad range of observations show (1) no consensus in the mean and trend in land-use change emissions, (2) a persistent low agreement among the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO2 flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) an apparent underestimation of the CO2 variability by ocean models, originating outside the tropics. This living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new global carbon budget and the progress in understanding the global carbon cycle compared with previous publications of this data set (Le Quéré et al., 2018, 2016, 2015a, b, 2014, 2013). All results presented here can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2018.
Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester
carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers
worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted
to biofuels. By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based
ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases
for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns
about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.
Humid tropical forests provide numerous global ecosystem services, but are under continuing threat of clearing from economic drivers. Here, we report primary humid tropical forest extent for the year 2001, and primary forest loss and distance to loss from 2002–2014 for the largest rainforest countries of Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Indonesia. Brazil's total area of primary forest loss is more than twice that of Indonesia and five times that of DRC. Despite unprecedented success in slowing deforestation along its forest frontier, Brazil's most remote forests are increasingly nearer to loss, as extractive activities such as logging and mining intrude upon previously intact forests. In absolute terms, DRC has the lowest area of primary forest loss; however, its forests are increasingly encroached upon as smallholder agriculturalists move into remaining forests, often to escape conflict and insecurity. The decrease in DRC forests' distance to loss as a function of area of forest loss was five times that of Brazil or Indonesia. In 2014, Indonesia had the least area of remaining primary forest. Despite an announced moratorium on concession licenses in 2011, Indonesia exhibited a rate of primary forest loss twice that of DRC and triple that of Brazil by the end of the study period. Forest loss dynamics in Indonesia range from industrial-scale clearing of coastal peatlands to logging of interior montane rainforests. While results illustrate considerable variation in forest loss dynamics between the three countries, the dominant narrative is of ongoing exploitation of primary humid tropical forests.
Integrated assessment models generate climate change mitigation scenarios consistent with global temperature targets. To limit warming to 2 °C, cost-effective mitigation pathways rely on extensive deployments of CO2 removal (CDR) technologies, including multi-gigatonne yearly CDR from the atmosphere through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and afforestation/reforestation. While these assumed CDR deployments keep ambitious temperature targets in reach, the associated rates of land-use transformation have not been evaluated. Here, we view implied integrated-assessment-model land-use conversion rates within a historical context. In scenarios with a likely chance of limiting warming to 2 °C in 2100, the rate of energy cropland expansion supporting BECCS proceeds at a median rate of 8.8 Mha yr−1 and 8.4% yr−1. This rate exceeds—by more than threefold—the observed expansion of soybean, the most rapidly expanding commodity crop. In some cases, mitigation scenarios include abrupt reversal of deforestation, paired with massive afforestation/reforestation. Historical land-use transformation rates do not represent an upper bound for future transformation rates. However, their stark contrast with modelled BECCS deployment rates implies challenges to explore in harnessing—or presuming the ready availability of—large-scale biomass-based CDR in the decades ahead. Reducing BECCS deployment to remain within these historical expansion rates would mean either the 2 °C target is missed or additional mitigation would need to occur elsewhere. Models for preventing climate from warming by more than 2 °C assume implementing land-use change, such as reforestation, to store carbon. This study finds these models assume 8.8 Mha yr−1 more cropland and, in some cases, massive reforestation and even afforestation.
Indonesia and Peru harbor some of the largest lowland tropical peatland areas. Indonesian peatlands are subject to much greater anthropogenic activity than Peru’s, including drainage, logging, agricultural conversion, and burning, resulting in high greenhouse gas and particulate emissions. To derive insights from the Indonesian experience, we explored patterns of impact in the two countries, and compared their predisposing factors. Impacts differ greatly among Indonesian regions and the Peruvian Amazon in the following order: Sumatra > Kalimantan > Papua > Peru. All impacts, except fire, are positively related to population density. Factors enhancing Indonesian peatlands’ susceptibility to disturbance include peat doming that facilitates drainage, coastal location, high local population, road access, government policies permitting peatland use, lack of enforcement of protections, and dry seasons that favor extensive burning. The main factors that could reduce peatland degradation in Peru compared with Indonesia are geographic isolation from coastal population centers, more compact peatland geomorphology, lower population and road density, more peatlands in protected areas, different land tenure policies, and different climatic drivers of fire; whereas factors that could enhance peatland degradation include oil and gas development, road expansion in peatland areas, and an absence of government policies explicitly protecting peatlands. We conclude that current peatland integrity in Peru arises from a confluence of factors that has slowed development, with no absolute barriers protecting Peruvian peatlands from a similar fate to Indonesia’s. If the goal is to maintain the integrity of Peruvian peatlands, government policies recognizing unique peatland functions and sensitivities will be necessary.
A major reduction in global deforestation is needed to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. Recent private sector commitments aim to eliminate deforestation from a company’s operations or supply chain, but they fall short on several fronts. Company pledges vary in the degree to which they include time-bound interventions with clear definitions and criteria to achieve verifiable outcomes. Zero-deforestation policies by companies may be insufficient to achieve broader impact on their own due to leakage, lack of transparency and traceability, selective adoption and smallholder marginalization. Public–private policy mixes are needed to increase the effectiveness of supply-chain initiatives that aim to reduce deforestation. We review current supply-chain initiatives, their effectiveness, and the challenges they face, and go on to identify knowledge gaps for complementary public–private policies.
Weather index-based crop insurance is increasingly becoming important as a risk mitigation strategy that farmers may use to mitigate adverse climate shocks and natural disasters encountered during farming. While Europe, North America, and Asia account for 20.1%, 55%, and 19.5% of the total agricultural insurance premium 26worldwide, respectively, Africa accounts fo r only 0.5% of the world insurance industry. One of the key reasons advanced against the low index insurance participation rate in Africa is the failure to involve farm households at the initial conceptualization and design of pilot initiatives. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to design an improved participatory methodology that could help elicit information on the value placed by farm households in Southwestern Burkina Faso on a new weather index-based crop insurance management initiative. A key concept in the improved participatory methodology is that of the willingness to pay (WTP) of farm households for the scheme. Knowledge of the maximum amount that farmers are willing to pay for the scheme can help insurance policy providers and public policy makers to design and put in place measures that sustain index insurance schemes in a developing country context and improve welfare among participating farmers.
Land management for carbon storage is discussed as being indispensable for climate change mitigation because of its large potential to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and to avoid further emissions from deforestation. However, the acceptance and feasibility of land-based mitigation projects depends on potential side effects on other important ecosystem functions and their services. Here, we use projections of future land use and land cover for different land-based mitigation options from two land-use models (IMAGE and MAgPIE) and evaluate their effects with a global dynamic vegetation model (LPJ-GUESS). In the land-use models, carbon removal was achieved either via growth of bioenergy crops combined with carbon capture and storage, via avoided deforestation and afforestation, or via a combination of both. We compare these scenarios to a reference scenario without land-based mitigation and analyse the LPJ-GUESS simulations with the aim of assessing synergies and trade-offs across a range of ecosystem service indicators: carbon storage, surface albedo, evapotranspiration, water runoff, crop production, nitrogen loss, and emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds.
In our mitigation simulations cumulative carbon storage by year 2099 ranged between 55 and 89 GtC. Other ecosystem service indicators were influenced heterogeneously both positively and negatively, with large variability across regions and land-use scenarios. Avoided deforestation and afforestation led to an increase in evapotranspiration and enhanced emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds, and to a decrease in albedo, runoff, and nitrogen loss. Crop production could also decrease in the afforestation scenarios as a result of reduced crop area, especially for MAgPIE land-use patterns, if assumed increases in crop yields cannot be realized. Bioenergy-based climate change mitigation was projected to affect less area globally than in the forest expansion scenarios, and resulted in less pronounced changes in most ecosystem service indicators than forest-based mitigation, but included a possible decrease in nitrogen loss, crop production, and biogenic volatile organic compounds emissions.
Transdisciplinary research (TDR) is discussed as a promising approach in land-use science and spatial research to address complex multifaceted “real-world problems” and to design strategies and solutions for sustainable development. TDR has become a widespread research approach in sustainability science and is increasingly promoted by research programmes and agencies (e.g., Future Earth and Horizon 2020). Against this backdrop, TDR can be considered a (social) innovation in the academic system, which is currently in the midst of an up-scaling diffusion process from a rather small TDR-advocating expert community to a broader science-practice community. We argue that this up-scaling phase also places TDR in a critical state as the concept potentially risks a type of “rhetorical mainstreaming”. The objectives of this study were to analyse how the challenging approach of TDR is currently adopted and implemented in the field of land-use research and to identify potential influencing factors. We studied 13 transdisciplinary research projects from Germany by performing qualitative interviews with coordinators, document analysis and participatory observation during meetings over a period of five years. Results show that the adoption level of the TDR concept varied widely among the studied projects, as did the adoption of the TDR indicators used in our analysis. In many of the investigated projects, we identified a clear lack of conceptual knowledge of TDR. In addition, we found that current academic structures limit the ability of researchers to thoroughly adapt to the requirements of TDR. We conclude that further communication and educational efforts that promote TDR are required. In addition, we advocate for the development of suitable funding instruments that support sustained research structures.
Significance
Most nations recently agreed to hold global average temperature rise to well below 2 °C. We examine how much climate mitigation nature can contribute to this goal with a comprehensive analysis of “natural climate solutions” (NCS): 20 conservation, restoration, and/or improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. We show that NCS can provide over one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilize warming to below 2 °C. Alongside aggressive fossil fuel emissions reductions, NCS offer a powerful set of options for nations to deliver on the Paris Climate Agreement while improving soil productivity, cleaning our air and water, and maintaining biodiversity.
The Paris Agreement has opened debate on whether limiting warming to 1.5 °C is compatible with current emission pledges and warming of about 0.9 °C from the mid-nineteenth century to the present decade. We show that limiting cumulative post-2015 CO2 emissions to about 200 GtC would limit post-2015 warming to less than 0.6 °C in 66% of Earth system model members of the CMIP5 ensemble with no mitigation of other climate drivers, increasing to 240 GtC with ambitious non-CO2 mitigation. We combine a simple climate–carbon-cycle model with estimated ranges for key climate system properties from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Assuming emissions peak and decline to below current levels by 2030, and continue thereafter on a much steeper decline, which would be historically unprecedented but consistent with a standard ambitious mitigation scenario (RCP2.6), results in a likely range of peak warming of 1.2–2.0 °C above the mid-nineteenth century. If CO2 emissions are continuously adjusted over time to limit 2100 warming to 1.5 °C, with ambitious non-CO2 mitigation, net future cumulative CO2 emissions are unlikely to prove less than 250 GtC and unlikely greater than 540 GtC. Hence, limiting warming to 1.5 °C is not yet a geophysical impossibility, but is likely to require delivery on strengthened pledges for 2030 followed by challengingly deep and rapid mitigation. Strengthening near-term emissions reductions would hedge against a high climate response or subsequent reduction rates proving economically, technically or politically unfeasible.
Significance
Brazil’s new Forest Code has the potential to halt illegal deforestation in the country’s native forests and savannas through implementation of a federal land registry—along with powerful tools that facilitate enforcement and give landowners a pathway to restoring or compensating their “forest deficits.” This study suggests that these tools fall short of their promise. Although landowners in eastern Amazonia have been motivated to join state land registries, many continue to deforest and few have restored their illegally cleared areas. Results indicate that the economic benefits of full compliance with the Forest Code remain scant. To end deforestation, Brazil must realign its financial and policy incentives to encourage this outcome. The fate of the country’s forests hangs in the balance.
Land clearing threatens biodiversity, impairs the functioning of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems, and is a key contributor to human-induced climate change. The rates of land clearing in the State of Queensland, Australia, are at globally significant levels, and have been the subject of intense and polarised political debate. In 2016, a legislative bill that aimed to restore stronger controls over land clearing failed to pass in the Queensland Parliament, despite the clear scientific basis for policy reform. Here, we provide a short history of the recent policy debate over land clearing in Queensland, in the context of its global and national ecological significance. Land clearing affects regional climates, leading to hotter, drier climates that will impact on the Queensland economy and local communities. Loss of habitat from land clearing is a key threatening process for many endangered animals and plants. Runoff from land clearing results in sediment and nutrient enrichment, which threatens the health of the Great Barrier Reef. Australia has made national and international commitments to conserve biodiversity and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, but current land clearing policies are not consistent with these commitments. Stronger regulation is needed to reduce vegetation loss, such as target-based regulation, which sets a cap on land clearing and could effectively halt vegetation loss over the long term. Lasting policy reform is required, and we recommend an effective policy mix that restricts clearing, provides economic opportunities for vegetation retention, and informs the Australian community about the value of native vegetation.
The capacity of a nation to address the hydrological impacts of climate change depends on the institutions through which water is governed. Inter-institutional networks that enable institutions to adapt and the factors that hinder smooth coordination are poorly understood. Using water governance in India as an example of a complex top-down bureaucratic system that requires effective networks between all key institutions, this research unravels the barriers to adaptation by combining quantitative internet data mining and qualitative analysis of interviews with representatives from twenty-six key institutions operating at the national level.
In December 2015 in Paris, leaders committed to achieve global, net decarbonization of human activities before 2100. This achievement would halt and even reverse anthropogenic climate change through the net removal of carbon from the atmosphere. However, the Paris documents contain few specific prescriptions for emissions mitigation, leaving various countries to pursue their own agendas. In this analysis, we project energy and land-use emissions mitigation pathways through 2100, subject to best-available parameterization of carbon-climate feedbacks and interdependencies. We find that, barring unforeseen and transformative technological advancement, anthropogenic emissions need to peak within the next 10 years, to maintain realistic pathways to meeting the COP21 emissions and warming targets. Fossil fuel consumption will probably need to be reduced below a quarter of primary energy supply by 2100 and the allowable consumption rate drops even further if negative emissions technologies remain technologically or economically unfeasible at the global scale.
The global land system is facing unprecedented pressures from growing human populations and climatic change. Understanding the effects these pressures may have is necessary to designing land management strategies that ensure food security, ecosystem service provision and successful climate mitigation and adaptation. However, the number of complex, interacting effects involved makes any complete understanding very difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, the recent development of integrated modelling frameworks allows for the exploration of the co-development of human and natural systems under scenarios of global change, potentially illuminating the main drivers and processes in future land system change. Here, we use one such integrated modelling framework (the CLIMSAVE Integrated Assessment Platform) to investigate the range of projected outcomes in the European land system across climatic and socio-economic scenarios for the 2050s. We find substantial consistency in locations and types of change even under the most divergent conditions, with results suggesting that climate change alone will lead to a contraction in the agricultural and forest area within Europe, particularly in southern Europe. This is partly offset by the introduction of socioeconomic changes that change both the demand for agricultural production, through changing food demand and net imports, and the efficiency of agricultural production. Simulated extensification and abandonment in the Mediterranean region is driven by future decreases in the relative profitability of the agricultural sector in southern Europe, owing to decreased productivity as a consequence of increased heat and drought stress and reduced irrigation water availability. The very low likelihood (< 33% probability) that current land use proportions in many parts of Europe will remain unchanged suggests that future policy should seek to promote and support the multifunctional role of agriculture and forests in different European regions, rather than focusing on increased productivity as a route to agricultural and forestry viability.
Background
In preparation for the 2015 international climate negotiations in Paris, Parties submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) expressing each countries’ respective post-2020 climate actions. In this paper we assess individual Parties’ expected reduction of emissions/removals from land use, land use change, and forest (LULUCF) sector for reaching their INDC target, and the aggregate global effect on the INDCs on the future development of emission and removals from the LULUCF sector. This has been done through analysis Parties’ official information concerning the role of LULUCF mitigation efforts for reaching INDC targets as presented in National Communications, Biennial Update Reports, and Additional file 1. ResultsOn the aggregate global level, the Parties themselves perceive that net LULUCF emissions will increase over time. Overall, the net LULUCF emissions are estimated to increase by 0.6 Gt CO2e year−1 (range: 0.1–1.1) in 2020 and 1.3 Gt CO2e year−1 (range: 0.7–2.1) in 2030, both compared to 2010 levels. On the other hand, the full implementation of the INDCs is estimated to lead to a reduction of net LULUCF emissions in 2030 compared to 2010 levels. It is estimated that if all conditional and unconditional INDCs are implemented, net LULUCF emissions would decrease by 0.5 Gt CO2e year−1 (range: 0.2–0.8) by 2020 and 0.9 Gt CO2e year−1 (range: 0.5–1.3) by 2030, both compared to 2010 levels. The largest absolute reductions of net LULUCF emissions (compared to 2010 levels) are expected from Indonesia and Brazil, followed by China and Ethiopia. Conclusions
The results highlights that countries are expecting a significant contribution from the LULUCF sector to meet their INDC mitigation targets. At the global level, the LULUCF sector is expected to contribute to as much as 20% of the full mitigation potential of all the conditional and unconditional INDC targets. However, large uncertainties still surround how Parties estimate, project and account for emissions and removals from the LULUCF sector. While INDCs represent a new source of land-use information, further information and updates of the INDCs will be required to reduce uncertainty of the LULUCF projections.
While climate science debates are focused on the attainment of peak anthropogenic CO2 emissions and policy tools to reduce peak temperatures, the human-energy-climate system can hold “rebound" surprises beyond this peak. Following the second industrial revolution, global per-capita CO2 emissions (cc) experienced a punctuated growth of about 100% every 60 years, mainly attributable to technological development and its global spread. A model of the human-energy-climate system capable of reproducing past punctuated dynamics shows that rebounds in global CO2 emissions emerge due to delays intrinsic to the diffusion of innovations. Such intrinsic delays in the adoption and spread of low-carbon emitting technologies, together with projected population growth, upset the warming target set by the Paris Agreement. To avoid rebounds and their negative climate effects, model calculations show that the diffusion of climate-friendly technologies must occur with lags one-order of magnitude shorter (i.e. ~6 years) than the characteristic time-scale of past punctuated growth in cc. Radically new strategies to globally implement technological advances at unprecedented rates are needed if current emission goals are to be achieved.
This article re-conceptualizes Climate Policy Integration (CPI) in the land use sector to highlight the need to assess the level of integration of mitigation and adaptation objectives and policies to minimize trade-offs and to exploit synergies. It suggests that effective CPI in the land use sector requires i) internal climate policy coherence between mitigation and adaptation objectives and policies; ii) external climate policy coherence between climate change and development objectives; iii) vertical policy integration to mainstream climate change into sectoral policies and; iv) horizontal policy integration by overarching governance structures for cross-sectoral coordination. This framework is used to examine CPI in the land use sector of Indonesia. The findings indicate that adaptation actors and policies are the main advocates of internal policy coherence. External policy coherence between mitigation and development planning is called for, but remains to be operationalized. Bureaucratic politics has in turn undermined vertical and horizontal policy integration. Under these circumstances it is unlikely that the Indonesian bureaucracy can deliver strong coordinated action addressing climate change in the land use sector, unless sectoral ministries internalize a strong mandate on internal and external climate policy coherence and find ways to coordinate policy action effectively.
Human land-use activities have resulted in large changes to the Earth's
surface, with resulting implications for climate. In the future, land-use
activities are likely to expand and intensify further to meet growing demands
for food, fiber, and energy. The Land Use Model Intercomparison Project
(LUMIP) aims to further advance understanding of the impacts of land-use and
land-cover change (LULCC) on climate, specifically addressing the following
questions. (1) What are the effects of LULCC on climate and biogeochemical
cycling (past–future)? (2) What are the impacts of land management on
surface fluxes of carbon, water, and energy, and are there regional
land-management strategies with the promise to help mitigate climate change?
In addressing these questions, LUMIP will also address a range of more
detailed science questions to get at process-level attribution, uncertainty,
data requirements, and other related issues in more depth and sophistication
than possible in a multi-model context to date. There will be particular
focus on the separation and quantification of the effects on climate from
LULCC relative to all forcings, separation of biogeochemical from
biogeophysical effects of land use, the unique impacts of land-cover change
vs. land-management change, modulation of land-use impact on climate by
land–atmosphere coupling strength, and the extent to which impacts of
enhanced CO2 concentrations on plant photosynthesis are modulated by
past and future land use.LUMIP involves three major sets of science activities: (1) development of an
updated and expanded historical and future land-use data set, (2) an
experimental protocol for specific LUMIP experiments for CMIP6, and
(3) definition of metrics and diagnostic protocols that quantify model
performance, and related sensitivities, with respect to LULCC. In this paper,
we describe LUMIP activity (2), i.e., the LUMIP simulations that will
formally be part of CMIP6. These experiments are explicitly designed to be
complementary to simulations requested in the CMIP6 DECK and historical
simulations and other CMIP6 MIPs including ScenarioMIP, C4MIP, LS3MIP, and
DAMIP. LUMIP includes a two-phase experimental design. Phase one features
idealized coupled and land-only model simulations designed to advance
process-level understanding of LULCC impacts on climate, as well as to
quantify model sensitivity to potential land-cover and land-use change. Phase
two experiments focus on quantification of the historic impact of land use
and the potential for future land management decisions to aid in mitigation
of climate change. This paper documents these simulations in detail, explains
their rationale, outlines plans for analysis, and describes a new subgrid
land-use tile data request for selected variables (reporting model output
data separately for primary and secondary land, crops, pasture, and urban
land-use types). It is essential that modeling groups participating in LUMIP
adhere to the experimental design as closely as possible and clearly report
how the model experiments were executed.
The Indonesian government recently confirmed its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to mitigate global climate change. A forest moratorium policy that protects forest and peatland is a significant part of the INDCs; however, its effectiveness is unclear in the face of complex land-use and land-cover change. This study aims to assess the dynamics of land-use change and ecosystem service supply as a function of local decision-making. We developed an agent-based model, Land-Use Change and Ecosystem Services (LUCES), and used it to explore the possible effects of the forest moratorium policy on the land-use decisions of private companies and communities. Our simulations for two districts in Central Kalimantan show that the current implementation of the forest moratorium policy is not effective in reducing forest conversion and carbon emissions. This is because companies continue to invest in converting secondary forest on mineral soils and the moratorium does not affect community decision-making. A policy that combines a forest moratorium with livelihood support and increases farm-gate prices of forest and agroforestry products could increase the local communities’ benefits from conservation. Forest and agroforestry areas that are profitable and competitive are more likely to be conserved and reduce potential carbon emission by about 36 %. The results for the two districts, with different pressures on local resources, suggest that appropriate additional measures require local fine-tuning. The LUCES model could be an ex ante tool to facilitate such fine-tuning and help the Indonesian government achieve its INDC goals as part of a wider sustainable development policy.
Human land-use activities have resulted in large to the Earth surface, with resulting implications for climate. In the future, land-use activities are likely to expand and intensify further to meet growing demands for food, fiber, and energy. The Land Use Model Intercomparison Project (LUMIP) aims to further advance understanding of the impacts of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) on climate, specifically addressing the questions: (1) What are the effects of LULCC on climate and biogeochemical cycling (past–future)? (2) What are the impacts of land management on surface fluxes of carbon, water, and energy and are there regional land-management strategies with promise to help mitigate and/or adapt to climate change? In addressing these questions, LUMIP will also address a range of more detailed science questions to get at process-level attribution, uncertainty, data requirements, and other related issues in more depth and sophistication than possible in a multi-model context to date. There will be particular focus on the separation and quantification of the effects on climate from land-use change relative to fossil fuel emissions, separation of biogeochemical from biogeophysical effects of land-use, the unique impacts of land-cover change versus land management change, modulation of land-use impact on climate by land-atmosphere coupling strength, and the extent that impacts of enhanced CO2 concentrations on plant photosynthesis are modulated by past and future land use. LUMIP involves three major sets of science activities: (1) development of an updated and expanded historical and future land-use dataset, (2) an experimental protocol for specific LUMIP experiments for CMIP6, and (3) definition of metrics and diagnostic protocols that quantify model performance, and related sensitivities, with respect to-. In this paper, we describe the LUMIP simulations that will formally be part of CMIP6. These experiments are explicitly designed to be complementary to experiments from the CMIP core, ScenarioMIP, and C4MIP. LUMIP includes a two-phase experimental design. Phase one features idealized coupled and land-only model experiments designed to advance process-level understanding of LULCC impacts on climate, as well as to quantify model sensitivity to potential land-cover and land-use change. Phase two experiments focus on quantification of the historic impact of land use and the potential for future land management decisions to aid in mitigation of climate change. This paper documents these simulations in detail, explains their rationale, outlines plans for analysis, and describes a new subgrid land-use tile data request (primary and secondary land, crops, pasture, urban). It is essential that modeling groups participating in LUMIP adhere to the experimental design as closely as possible.
Within the existing literature, the role of experience of risk on attitudinal and behavioural risk response has been relatively neglected. Recent research that draws on the psychological distance of climate change as a concept notes the importance of local, significant experience as a driver for encouraging appropriate response. The experience of flooding was used as the stimulus in this paper, and emphasis placed on whether direct and/or indirect experience of flood risk is associated with different responses to climate change risk. In order to explore the relationship between climate change risk experience and response in the form of on-farm mitigation and adaptation, this paper draws on a case study of farmers in England, many of whom have experienced flooding. Results from a quantitative survey undertaken with 200 farmers in Gloucestershire, England are discussed. Statistical analysis found experience of flooding to be significantly associated with a heightened concern for climate change. Although also finding an association between experience and behavioural response, the sample were most likely to be taking adaptive behaviour as part of normal practice, with factors such as lack of overall concern for climate change risk and absence of information and advice likely to be the main barriers to action. Risk communication needs to further emphasise the connection between climate change and extreme weather events to allow for farmers to perceive climate change as a relevant and locally salient phenomenon, and subsequent tailored information and advice should be offered to clearly illustrate the best means of on-farm response. Where possible, emphasis must be placed on actions that also enable adaptation to other, more immediate risks which farmers in this study more readily exhibited concern for, such as market volatility.
Numerous sources provide evidence of trends and patterns in average farm size and farmland distribution worldwide, but they often lack documentation, are in some cases out of date, and do not provide comprehensive global and comparative regional estimates. This article uses agricultural census data (provided at the country level in Web Appendix) to show that there are more than 570 million farms worldwide, most of which are small and family-operated. It shows that small farms (less than 2 ha) operate about 12% and family farms about 75% of the world’s agricultural land. It shows that average farm size decreased in most low- and lower-middle-income countries for which data are available from 1960 to 2000, whereas average farm sizes increased from 1960 to 2000 in some upper-middle-income countries and in nearly all high-income countries for which we have information.
Researchers who flirt with the idea that more authoritarian governance would help us address global warming are badly mistaken. What's really needed is more democracy.
Inadequate policy surveillance has undermined the effectiveness of multilateral climate agreements. To illustrate an alternative approach to transparency, I evaluate policy surveillance under the 2009 G-20 fossil fuel subsidies agreement. The Leaders of the Group of 20 nations tasked their energy and finance ministers to identify and phase-out fossil fuel subsidies. The G-20 leaders agreed to submit their subsidy reform strategies to peer review and to independent expert review conducted by international organizations. This process of developed and developing countries pledging to pursue the same policy objective, designing and publicizing implementation plans, and subjecting plans and performance to review by international organizations differs considerably from the historic approach under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This paper draws lessons from the fossil fuel subsidies agreement for climate policy surveillance.
Diffusion theory and political economy are the two most common ways by which rural sociologists have explained the widespread use of agricultural innovations. In this paper, we argue, borrowing from science studies and using the empirical case of soybeans in Brazil, that the use of agricultural innovations is better understood as the result of the construction of networks of people and things. Thirty years ago soybean production in Brazil was insignificant. However, at that time a soybean network began to be formed. Initial actors were, among others, (1) soybean varieties produced in the United States, (2) wheat farmers located in the south of Brazil, and (3) soil in need of nitrogen, an expensive input for the new wheat varieties. State policies were no doubt important in consolidating that network. However, other persons, institutions and things were also necessary, including science and technology, the creation and/or expansion of farmers' organizations such as cooperatives, and the solution to the problem of photoperiod sensitivity in soybeans. We follow the soybean from its introduction in Brazil to its present status as an important crop. The overall context within which the soybean network began is also described. We conclude that the actor network approach is more congruent with the history of soybeans in Brazil than diffusion theory or political economy.
To realize ambitious climate targets, research should focus more on effective ways to encourage rapid and wide-scale changes in climate mitigation actions, and less on understanding climate change beliefs.
Russia accounts for approximately 20% of the world's forest cover. More than 59% of the total territory of the Russian Federation is classified as forest land. However, the forest sector contributes only 1.3% to Russian gross domestic product and the Russian forest industry accounts for less than 4% of the world's forest products trade. This paper analyzes the most significant challenges facing Russian forest management including example of wood chips export to the EU and will suggest specific policy proposals that could be made in order to improve the forest management and forest transportation in Russia. Russian forestry has a lot of challenges such as lack of proper forest infrastructure, inadequate forest fire protection, unqualified personnel and unclear legislation. Most of these challenges are linked to one another and solving one problem can lead to the solution of others. The improvement of Russian forest governance is difficult and hard for policy, but without significant changes in current Russian forest management practices, forest degradation in Russia will continue to increase. The degradation of Russian forests could lead to a loss of global resources in general.
The system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) found in over 3,000 bilateral investment treaties and numerous regional trade agreements has been criticized for interfering with the rights of sovereign states to regulate investment in the public interest, for example, to protect the environment and public health. This article argues that while much of the public debate around ISDS has focused on a small number of cases that have arisen over the regulation of tobacco packaging, there is a far greater threat posed by the potential use of ISDS by the fossil fuel industry to stall action on climate change. It is hypothesized that fossil fuel corporations will emulate a tactic employed by the tobacco industry – that of using ISDS to induce cross-border regulatory chill: the delay in policy uptake in jurisdictions outside the jurisdiction in which the ISDS claim is brought. Importantly, fossil fuel corporations do not have to win any ISDS cases for this strategy to be effective; they only have to be willing to launch them. The article concludes with three options to reform trade and investment agreements to better align them with climate change mitigation efforts: (i) exclude ISDS provisions; (ii) prohibit fossil fuel industries from accessing ISDS; or (iii) carve out all government measures taken in pursuit of international obligations (for example, under the Paris Agreement on climate change) from challenge under ISDS.
All major industrialized countries are failing to meet the pledges they made to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, warn David G. Victor and colleagues.
The recently published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections to 2100 give likely ranges of global temperature increase in four scenarios for population, economic growth and carbon use. However, these projections are not based on a fully statistical approach. Here we use a country-specific version of Kaya's identity to develop a statistically based probabilistic forecast of CO 2 emissions and temperature change to 2100. Using data for 1960-2010, including the UN's probabilistic population projections for all countries, we develop a joint Bayesian hierarchical model for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and carbon intensity. We find that the 90% interval for cumulative CO 2 emissions includes the IPCC's two middle scenarios but not the extreme ones. The likely range of global temperature increase is 2.0-4.9 °C, with median 3.2 °C and a 5% (1%) chance that it will be less than 2 °C (1.5 °C). Population growth is not a major contributing factor. Our model is not a business as usual' scenario, but rather is based on data which already show the effect of emission mitigation policies. Achieving the goal of less than 1.5 °C warming will require carbon intensity to decline much faster than in the recent past.
In recent articles, I have argued that integrated assessment models (IAMs) have flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis. IAM-based analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision that is illusory, and can fool policy-makers into thinking that the forecasts the models generate have some kind of scientific legitimacy. But some have claimed that we need some kind of model, and that IAMs can be structured and used in ways that correct for their shortcomings. For example, it has been argued that although we know little or nothing about key relationships in the model, we can get around this problem by attaching probability distributions to various parameters and then simulating the model using Monte Carlo methods. I argue that this would buy us nothing, and that a simpler and more transparent approach to the design of climate change policy is preferable. I briefly outline what that approach would look like.
Forest-based climate mitigation may occur through conserving and enhancing the carbon sink and through reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation. Yet the inclusion of forests in international climate agreements has been complex, often considered a secondary mitigation option. In the context of the Paris Climate Agreement, countries submitted their (Intended) Nationally Determined Contributions ((I)NDCs), including climate mitigation targets. Assuming full implementation of (I)NDCs, we show that land use, and forests in particular, emerge as a key component of the Paris Agreement: turning globally from a net anthropogenic source during 1990–2010 (1.3 ± 1.1 GtCO2e yr⁻¹) to a net sink of carbon by 2030 (up to −1.1 ± 0.5 GtCO2e yr⁻¹), and providing a quarter of emission reductions planned by countries. Realizing and tracking this mitigation potential requires more transparency in countries’ pledges and enhanced science-policy cooperation to increase confidence in numbers, including reconciling the ≈3 GtCO2e yr⁻¹ difference in estimates between country reports and scientific studies.
Models of the land system are essential to our understanding of the magnitude and impacts of climate change. These models are required to represent a large number of processes in different sectors, but face particular challenges in describing the individual and social behaviors that underpin climate change mitigation and adaptation. We assess descriptions of these behaviors in existing models, their commonalities and differences, and the uses to which they have been put. We find that behavioral models have a distinct and important role to play in climate research, but that they currently suffer from being strongly sectoral in nature, with agricultural models being the most common and behaviorally rich. There are also clear convergences, with economic‐based decision‐making remaining dominant and behaviors such as diffusion, interaction, anticipation, or learning remaining relatively neglected. Active climate change is also rarely modeled, with adaptation and mitigation generally represented as responses to economic drivers under static climatic conditions. Furthermore, dynamic behaviors, objectives, or decision‐making processes are almost entirely absent, despite their clear relevance to climate change responses. We conclude that models have been more successful in the identification of important processes than in their implementation and that, while some behavioral processes may remain impossible to model, behavioral models of adaptation and mitigation in land‐based sectors have substantial unexplored potential. We suggest that greater attention be paid to the cumulative coverage of models in this field, and that improvements in the representation of certain key behaviors be prioritized. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e448. doi: 10.1002/wcc.448
This article is categorized under: Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Representing Uncertainty
Political upsets could stall coordinated international mitigation action, but emissions and investments over the next few years will have long-term consequences. Any delays to mitigation or cuts to renewable energy research by the US will likely render the 2 [deg]C target unachievable if a global precedent is set.
In the future, the land system will be facing new intersecting challenges. While food demand, especially for resource-intensive livestock based commodities, is expected to increase, the terrestrial system has large potentials for climate change mitigation through improved agricultural management, providing biomass for bioenergy, and conserving or even enhancing carbon stocks of ecosystems. However, uncertainties in future socio-economic land use drivers may result in very different land-use dynamics and consequences for land-based ecosystem services. This is the first study with a systematic interpretation of the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs) in terms of possible land-use changes and their consequences for the agricultural system, food provision and prices as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, five alternative Integrated Assessment Models with distinctive land-use modules have been used for the translation of the SSP narratives into quantitative projections. The model results reflect the general storylines of the SSPs and indicate a broad range of potential land-use futures with global agricultural land of 4900 mio ha in 2005 decreasing by 810 mio ha until 2100 at the lower (SSP1) and increasing by 1080 mio ha (SSP3) at the upper end. Greenhouse gas emissions from land use and land use change, as a direct outcome of these diverse land-use dynamics, and agricultural production systems differ strongly across SSPs (e.g. cumulative land use change emissions between 2005 and 2100 range from −54 to 402 Gt CO2). The inclusion of land-based mitigation efforts, particularly those in the most ambitious mitigation scenarios, further broadens the range of potential land futures and can strongly affect greenhouse gas dynamics and food prices. In general, it can be concluded that low demand for agricultural commodities, rapid growth in agricultural productivity and globalized trade, all most pronounced in a SSP1 world, have the potential to enhance the extent of natural ecosystems, lead to lowest greenhouse gas emissions from the land system and decrease food prices over time. The SSP-based land use pathways presented in this paper aim at supporting future climate research and provide the basis for further regional integrated assessments, biodiversity research and climate impact analysis.
Understanding uncertainties in land cover projections is critical to investigating land-based climate mitigation policies, assessing the potential of climate adaptation strategies, and quantifying the impacts of land cover change on the climate system. Here we identify and quantify uncertainties in global and European land cover projections over a diverse range of model types and scenarios, extending the analysis beyond the agro-economic models included in previous comparisons. The results from 75 simulations over 18 models are analysed and show a large range in land cover area projections, with the highest variability occurring in future cropland areas. We demonstrate systematic differences in land cover areas associated with the characteristics of the modelling approach, which is at least as great as the differences attributed to the scenario variations. The results lead us to conclude that a higher degree of uncertainty exists in land use projections than currently included in climate or earth system projections. To account for land use uncertainty, it is recommended to use a diverse set of models and approaches when assessing the potential impacts of land cover change on future climate. Additionally, further work is needed to better understand the assumptions driving land use model results and reveal the causes of uncertainty in more depth, to help reduce model uncertainty and improve the projections of land cover. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
The Paris climate agreement aims at holding global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and to “pursue efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius. To accomplish this, countries have submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) outlining their post-2020 climate action. Here we assess the effect of current INDCs on reducing aggregate greenhouse gas emissions, its implications for achieving the temperature objective of the Paris climate agreement, and potential options for overachievement. The INDCs collectively lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to where current policies stand, but still imply a median warming of 2.6–3.1 degrees Celsius by 2100. More can be achieved, because the agreement stipulates that targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are strengthened over time, both in ambition and scope. Substantial enhancement or over-delivery on current INDCs by additional national, sub-national and non-state actions is required to maintain a reasonable chance of meetin
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) has emerged as a promising climate change mitigation mechanism in developing countries. This article examines the national political context in 13 REDD+ countries in order to identify the enabling conditions for achieving progress with the implementation of countries’ REDD+ policies and measures. The analysis builds on a qualitative comparative analysis of various countries’ progress with REDD+ conducted in 12 REDD+ countries in 2012, which highlighted the importance of factors such as already initiated policy change, and the presence of coalitions calling for broader policy change. A follow-up survey in 2014 was considered timely because the REDD+ policy arena, at the international and country levels, is highly dynamic and undergoes constant evolution, which affects progress with REDD+ policy-making and implementation. Furthermore, we will now examine whether the ‘promise’ of performance-based funds has played a role in enabling the establishment of REDD+. The results show a set of enabling conditions and characteristics of the policy process under which REDD+ policies can be established. The study finds that the existence of broader policy change, and availability of performance-based funding in combination with strong national ownership of the REDD+ policy process, may help guide other countries seeking to formulate REDD+ policies that are likely to deliver efficient, effective and equitable outcomes.
Policy relevance
Tropical forest countries struggle with the design and implementation of coherent policies and measures to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Evidence on which factors and configurations are crucial to make progress towards these challenging policy objectives will be helpful for decision makers and practitioners at all levels involved in REDD+. Key findings highlight the importance of already initiated policy change, and the availability of performance-based funding in combination with strong national ownership of the REDD+ process. These findings provide guidance to REDD+ countries as to which enabling conditions need to be strengthened to facilitate effective, efficient and equitable REDD+ policy formulation and implementation.
The call for integrated social–environmental science, complete with outreach to applications and solutions, is escalating worldwide. Drawing on several decades of experience, researchers engaged in such science, completed an assessment of the design and management attributes and impact pathways that lead to successful projects and programs and to understand key impediments to success. These characteristics are delineated and discussed using examples from individual projects and programs. From this, three principal lessons leading to successful efforts emerge that address co-design, adaptive or flexible management, and diversity of knowledge. In addition, five challenges for this science are identified: accounting for change, addressing sponsorship and timelines, appreciating different knowledge systems, adaptively communicating, and improving linkages to policy.
An IPCC Special Report on 1.5 [deg]C should focus on resolving fundamental scientific and political uncertainties, not fixate on developing unachievable mitigation pathways.
We investigate the prospects of three zero-emission scenarios for achieving the target of limiting global mean temperature rise to 2 °C or below, and compare them with the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario involving no climate policy intervention. The “2100 zero” emissions scenario requires zero emissions after 2100 until 2150. The “350 ppm zero” emissions scenario entails zero emissions in the latter half of this century, which can be achieved by the cumulative emissions constraints of the Wigley–Richels–Edmonds (WRE) 350 from 2010 to 2150. Finally, the “net zero” scenario requires zero cumulative emissions from 2010 to 2150, allowing positive emissions over the coming several decades that would be balanced-out by negative emissions in the latter half of the century. The role of biomass energy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) with forested land is also assessed with these scenarios. The results indicate that the 2 °C target can be achieved in the “net zero” scenario, while the “350 ppm zero” scenario would result in a temperature rise of 2.4 °C. The “2100 zero” scenario achieved a 4.1 °C increase, while the BAU reached about 5.2 °C. BECCS contributed to achieving zero-emission requirements while providing a limited contribution to energy supply. The findings indicate substantial future challenges for the management of forested land.
Diffusion theory and political economy are the two most common ways by which rural sociologists have explained the widespread use of agricultural innovations. In this paper, we argue, borrowing from science studies and using the empirical case of soybeans in Brazil, that the use of agricultural innovations is better understood as the result of the construction of networks of people and things. Thirty years ago soybean production in Brazil was insignificant. However, at that time a soybean network began to be formed. Initial actors were, among others: 1) soybean varieties produced in the US, 2) wheat farmers located in the south of Brazil, and 3) soil in need of nitrogen, an expensive input for the new wheat varieties. State policies were no doubt important in consolidating that network. However, other persons, institutions and things were also necessary, including science and technology, the creation and/or expansion of farmers' organizations such as cooperatives, and the solution to the problem of photoperiod sensitivity in soybeans. We follow the soybean from its introduction in Brazil to its present status as an important crop. The overall context within which the soybean network began is also described. We conclude that the actor network approach is more congruent with the history of soybeans in Brazil than diffusion theory or political economy.
This paper identifies conditions under which the Clean Development Mechanism and other carbon finance projects effectively generate genuine, "additional" carbon credits-relying on a systematic empirical investigation of afforestation/reforestation and bioenergy carbon finance projects across Tanzania, Uganda, and Moldova. At low global carbon prices, additionality was related to the interests of project developers and their resulting capacities and motivations for project implementation. Certain organizations with capacity for mitigation projects were curiously not involved with carbon finance. A distinction between neo-developmental (Tanzania) and liberal neo-developmental (Uganda and Moldova) political economy preferences explains variation in the presence or absence of effective project developers.