Abstract
Agricultural sectors play a key role in the economics of climate change. Land as an input to agricultural production is one of the most important links between economy and the biosphere, representing a direct projection of human action on the natural environment. Agricultural management practices and cropping patterns exert an enormous effect on biogeochemical cycles, freshwater availability and soil quality. Agriculture also plays an important role in emitting and storing greenhouse gases. To consistently investigate climate policy and future pathways for the economic and natural environment, a realistic representation of agricultural land use is essential. Top—down Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models have increasingly been used for this purpose. CGE models simulate the simultaneous equilibrium in a set of interdependent markets, and are especially suited to analyze agricultural markets from a global perspective. However, modeling agricultural sectors in CGE models is not a trivial task, mainly because of differences in temporal and geographic aggregation scales. This study surveys some proposed modeling strategies and highlights different tradeoffs involved in the various approaches. Coupling of top-down and bottom-up models is found to be the most applicable for comprehensive analysis of agriculture in prism of climate change. However, linking interdisciplinary data, methods and outputs is still the major obstacle to be solved for wide-scale implementation.
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Notes
MtC-eq/yr are millions of tons of carbon equivalent GHG per year, with global warming potentials of methane, nitrous oxide and other GHG other than carbon dioxide, used as conversion coefficients for non-CO2 gases.
For a review of carbon sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems, see http://csite.esd.ornl.gov.
See Hubacek and van den Bergh (2006) for a review of changing concepts of land in economic theory.
In standard GTAP model CET of land transformation equals −1.
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This paper has been produced within the framework of the project CIRCE—Climate Change and Impact Research: the Mediterranean Environment, contract N. 036961, funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme
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Palatnik, R.R., Roson, R. Climate change and agriculture in computable general equilibrium models: alternative modeling strategies and data needs. Climatic Change 112, 1085–1100 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0356-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0356-6