3 research outputs found
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An Econometric Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on Forest Land Value and Broad Land-use Change
Climate change affects the choice of land-use not only through its direct effect on the productive potential of land, but also through human actions that alter the landscape. In this dissertation, I estimate current climate's effect on the economic net returns to alternative land-use systems in the United States. Then I model the conversion between these alternative uses to analyze how future climate change may alter future landscapes. My research contributes to the general knowledge of natural resource and environmental economics by i) developing the first national scale application of the Ricardian method to the economic return to forestry, ii) conducting the first study to model broad land-use change as an explicit function of climate variables for the conterminous U.S., and iii) constructing a novel and flexible framework for analyzing alternative future climate and demographic scenarios and their effect on land-use change. I model climate's impact on the economic net returns to four major U.S. land-use systems: crop, pasture, forest, and urban. Each climate model is specified separately to capture the distinct ways that climate drives land rents. The climate models are used to predict the impact of climate change on the profitability of the alternative land-uses. Predicted climate change impacts on land rent are the inputs to a discrete choice logit model, facilitating estimation of transition probabilities for land starting in crop, pasture, and forest. A functional relationship is established between climate and the probability of land-use change. The full model is used to examine the impact of climate change on the southeastern U.S. landscape. The national analysis of forest rents indicates significant increases to forest profitability across most of the U.S. under climate change projections to 2050. However, there is limited evidence that higher forest rents in the southeast will induce large shifts in the forest land area. Although climate change increases the amount of forest land, the magnitude of impact is small relative to non-climatic drivers of land-use change. The models constructed here have the potential to test numerous climate change scenarios with significant implications for land-use policy
An Empirical Analysis of Climate Uncertainty and Land-use Transitions in the U.S. Pacific and Mountain Regions
This paper uses most recent plot-level data from the National Resource Inventory (NRI) over the period 2002 to 2012. Using these data with county-level land-use net returns, we first examine the land-use transitions among crop, pasture, range, forest, urban and Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and find that land-use net returns are the main determinants from land-use transitions and land with low soil quality is more likely to be used for low-productive land activities, such as grazing. Second, we predict land-use changes under future climate projections using projected land-use net returns from hedonic regressions for crop, pasture, range, forest and urban. Our estimation results of the land-use model are consistent to economic theory as well as to previous literature that we have positive coefficients on crop and urban land use net returns and negative coefficients on the transition costs. We also find that crop and pasture land use net returns increase as the mean precipitation increase and pastureland net return is reduced if growing season degree-days are increased, suggesting the substation effects between crop and pasture land use when the temperature is optimal for plant growing. When predict into the future, we find the expansion of urban land with expenses of crop and CRP land
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The hidden value of trees: Quantifying the ecosystem services of tree lineages and their major threats across the contiguous US
Trees provide critical contributions to human well-being. They sequester and store greenhouse gasses, filter air pollutants, provide wood, food, and other products, among other benefits. These benefits are threatened by climate change, fires, pests and pathogens. To quantify the current value of the flow of ecosystem services from U.S. trees, and the threats they face, we combine macroevolutionary and economic valuation approaches using spatially explicit data about tree species and lineages. We find that the value of five key ecosystem services with adequate data generated by US trees is 85 B; high: $137 B; 2010 USD). The non-market value of trees from carbon storage and air pollution removal far exceed their commercial value from wood products and food crops. Two lineages—pines and oaks—account for 42% of the value of these services. The majority of species face threats from climate change, many face increasing fire risk, and known pests and pathogens threaten 40% of total woody biomass. The most valuable US tree species and lineages are among those most threatened by known pests and pathogens, with species most valuable for carbon storage most at risk from increasing fire threat. High turnover of tree species across the continent results in a diverse set of species distributed across the tree of life contributing to ecosystem services in the U.S. The high diversity of taxa across U.S. forests may be important in buffering ecosystem service losses if and when the most valuable lineages are compromised