Economic Analysis of Land Use in Global Climate Change Policy

Land has long been overlooked in economics. That is now changing. A substantial part of the solution to the climate crisis may lie in growing crops for fuel and using trees for storing carbon. This book investigates the potential of these options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, estimates the costs to the economy, and analyses the trade-offs with growing food. The first part presents new databases that are necessary to underpin policy-relevant research in the field of climate change while describing and critically assessing the underlying data, the methodologies used, and the first applications.

Together, the new data and the extended models allow for a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a land use and climate policy. This book outlines key empirical and analytical issues associated with modelling land use and land use change in the context of global climate change policy. It places special emphasis on the economy-wide competition for land and other resources, especially;

• The implications of changes in land use for the cost of climate change mitigation,
• Land use change as a result of mitigation, and
• Feedback from changes in the global climate to land use.

By offering synthesis and evaluation of a variety of different approaches to this challenging field of research, this book will serve as a key reference for future work in the economic analysis of land use and climate change policy.

Thomas W. Hertel is Executive Director and founder of the Global Trade Analysis Project at Purdue University, USA.

Steven Rose is a senior research economist at the Electric Power Research Institute in the Global Climate Change Research Group in Washington, DC, and was recently a senior researcher at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Richard S. J. Tol is Research Professor at the Economics and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.