Abstract
As the world becomes richer, competing priorities for land use are emerging. Developing countries are increasingly following the lead set by rich countries and they are setting aside reserves to preserve biodiversity as well as create opportunities for eco-tourism. Initiatives to reduce deforestation and forest degradation have also gained momentum over the past decade, with ambitious REDD+ initiatives associated with climate mitigation getting added attention. This chapter reviews the environmental demands for land, how they have evolved historically, their likely paths in the future, and the implications for global cropland availability. Particular attention will be paid to the potential for land-based carbon sequestration as a path to climate change mitigation. Recent research has shown that such initiatives could have a very significant impact on global cropland supplies and also on food prices and food security. We review this evidence and use it as the basis for SIMPLE model simulations in which the supply of land to agriculture is altered in light of projected carbon sequestration initiatives. Results highlight the impacts on food prices and food security from these competing uses of land.
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Notes
- 1.
A petagram is equal to 1.0E12 kg.
- 2.
- 3.
We use Eq. (7.1) to calculate the effective cropland supply shift from the equilibrium changes in croplands taken from Golub et al. (2013)). We use the estimates of global demand, intensive and extensive margins in SIMPLE in order to come up with the global scalar needed to calculate the effective cropland supply shift. The scalar is equal to 1.30 in this model.
- 4.
Note that we are assuming food markets are perfectly integrated under these scenarios. The price effects from such shocks will become more evident if we relax this assumption and introduce distinction between international and domestic markets (see Chap. 11).
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Hertel, T.W., Baldos, U.L.C. (2016). Land-Based Environmental Services. In: Global Change and the Challenges of Sustainably Feeding a Growing Planet. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22662-0_7
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