Modeling agriculture and land use in an integrated assessment framework

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