Agriculture's Role in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Examines technical, economic, and policy trends. Explores efforts to encourage farmers to adopt new agricultural practices that reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Reviews biofuel options, and related policy implications

The Limits of Bioenergy : A Complex Systems Approach to Land Use Dynamics and Constraints

This thesis aims to use a novel methodology to obtain an understanding of the potential limits of bioenergy by using a complex systems approach for assessing land use dynamics and constraints. Although bioenergy is classified as a renewable energy source, land is a finite resource and its expansion limited. The anthropogenic demands on land result from a combination of multiple provisioning services. These include global food consumption, dietary preference, crop and livestock yields, land use integration, wastes and residues, and bioenergy yields and forms, as well as the allocation of surplus land for forestry and energy crops, and the potential role of negative emission technologies. Thus, bioenergy is just one part of a complex land-use system. The general hypothesis is that there are fundamental limits to the overall scale and rate of the sustainable expansion of bioenergy, which can be assessed by means of combinations of empirical data, mapping tools and complex systems models. To this end, a novel methodological approach is proposed, which is based on a combination of two original models. The first one is termed the Global Calculator Land Use Change Model (GCLUC), developed as part of the Global Calculator Project, in which land is freely allocated worldwide and food security is assumed a priority. The second considers land for dedicated energy crops as a delimited reserve, by integrating Hubbert’s curve principles (originally proposed for peak oil assessments) in agro-ecological zoning schemes (as recently done for sugarcane ethanol in Brazil), resulting in a new model here termed green-Hubbert. The results show ranges of bioenergy potentials and expansion rates in the context of different land use futures. The potential public policies necessary to support sustainable bioenergy are also discussed. Finally, the conclusions show that, indeed, there are fundamental limits to bioenergy, and these limits are dynamic over time.Open Acces

Agricultural trade liberalization and poverty in Brazil:

"This paper addresses the potential effects of a world agricultural trade liberalization scenario on poverty and regional income distribution in Brazil, using an interregional applied general equilibrium (AGE) and microsimulation model of Brazil, tailored for income distribution and poverty analysis. The model distinguishes 10 different labor types and 270 different household expenditure patterns. Income can originate from 41 different production activities (which produce 52 commodities), located in 27 states in the country. The AGE model is linked to a microsimulation model that includes 112,055 Brazilian households and 263,938 adults. The scenario is generated from a previous run of the MIRAGE model, which assesses the likely impacts of a Doha Development Agenda agreement, based on the draft on agriculture by Crawford Falconer and the draft on nonagricultural market access by Don Stephenson. The results of this global scenario are transmitted to the Brazilian model. Poverty and income distribution indexes are computed over the entire sample of households and persons, before and after the introduction of policy shocks. Model results show that the simulated trade policy shocks have positive effects on poverty and income distribution in Brazil. The simulated effects on poverty and income distribution are positive in aggregate, with benefits concentrated in the poorest households. The results, however, differ across the Brazilian territory, worsening in some important states, where the poverty and inequality indicators increase. The gains in agriculture are found to benefit all the agents involved, from workers to small producers to large farmers, rejecting the idea that just large farmers would gain." from authors' abstractEconomic integration, Poverty, Income distribution, Globalization, Markets, trade,