Abstracts

Natural Climate Solutions: Essays on Climate Mitigation in Agriculture, Forestry, and Land Use

by Emily McGlynn

Policy makers around the world have recognized the role that agriculture, forestry, and land use can play in addressing climate change. These sectors are a growing source of greenhouse gases (GHGs), emitting one quarter of global anthropogenic GHG emissions annually. However, global integrated assessment models estimate that enhancing natural land-based CO2 sinks, avoiding deforestation, and using bioenergy to avoid fossil fuel use could provide nearly one third of GHG abatement required to avoid the most extreme impacts of climate change. Through dedicated management and preservation, natural and managed landscapes can remove CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, storing carbon in trunks, branches, roots, soils, and detritus for decades and even centuries.Yet outside the confines of optimization models, federal, state, and local policy makers are often unsure how to efficiently deploy natural climate solutions, given the many markets, laws, landowners, and natural systems that influence net GHG outcomes and the potential for negative impacts to ecosystems and social welfare. In this dissertation, I provide three essays that inform natural climate solutions policy, accounting for important sources of real-world complexity. • Chapter 1. Addressing uncertainty and bias in land use, land use change, and forestry greenhouse gas inventories. National GHG inventories (NGHGIs) are the primary tool for tracking anthropogenic GHG emissions for individual countries, sectors, and sources. I propose an analytical framework for implementing the uncertainty provisions of the UN Paris Agreement Enhanced Transparency Framework, with a view to identifying the largest sources of land use, land use change, and forestry uncertainty in National GHG Inventories and prioritizing methodological improvements. This chapter was published in Climatic Change. • Chapter 2. Conserving carbon: Evaluating term-limited conservation programs. I develop a structural model of the landowner decision to participate in a voluntary, term-limited conservation program that constrains the optimal timing of land use change and that allows for re-enrollment, addressing a key literature gap in the evaluation of climate and conservation policy in forestry and agricultural sectors. • Chapter 3. The problem with pricing “carbon”: exploring forest-driven albedo effects in DICELAND. I update the Dynamic Integrated model for Climate and the Economy (DICE) to endogenously control global forest carbon sequestration activity. I use the so-called DICELAND model to estimate efficient global carbon prices and forest CO2 mitigation levels when accounting for albedo (land-darkening) effects of global forest expansion.