Climate-induced Land Use Change in France: Impacts of Agricultural Adaptation and Climate Change Mitigation

Abstract

Interaction between mitigation and adaptation is a key question for the design of climate policies. In this paper, we study how land use adaptation to climate change impacts land use competition in the agriculture, forest and other land use (AFOLU) sector and how a mitigation policy in agriculture might affect this competition. We use for this purpose two sector-specific bio-economic models of agriculture and forest combined with an econometric land use shares model to simulate the impacts of two climate change scenarios (A2 and B1, 2100 horizon), and a greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture policy consisting of a tax of between 0 and 200 e/tCO 2 equivalent. Our results show that both climate change scenarios lead to an increase in the area devoted to agriculture at the expense of forest which could have a negative impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. The mitigation policy would curtail agricultural expansion, and thus could counteract the effects of land use adaptation to climate change.In other words, accounting for land use competition results in a reduction of the abatement costs of the mitigation policy in the agricultural sector.

A review of global-local-global linkages in economic land-use/cover change models

“…For example, increases in crop yield due to technological change are endogenous in MAgPIE . Demand for food and materials are often exogenously calculated, based on historical consumption patterns and future demand expectations driven by population and income changes (Schmitz et al 2012, Stevanović et al 2017, Chen and Khanna 2018, Lungarska and Chakir 2018, which can respond endogenously to price variations . Similarly, most models include an endogenous component to yields, allowing adjustments to input and output prices (von Lampe et al 2014).…”

Impacts of Land Use and Climate Change on Freshwater Ecosystems in France

“…To capture the effects of land management on freshwater biodiversity, we distinguish four classes for each of these two land uses. The distinction is made at the scale of the regular grid of the land use The median values are evaluated at the scale of the land use share model from Lungarska and Chakir (2018).…”

“…We build on the results in Lungarska and Chakir (2018) on the impact of climate change on land use. Climate change affects the land rents of different land-based economic activities such as agriculture, pasture and forestry.…”

“…Nevertheless, these two sectors have numerous options for adaptation to the new climate conditions. In the sector-specific model for agriculture Results concerning climate induced land use change indicate that we can expect crop land to expand at the expense of forests and pastures (Lungarska and Chakir, 2018).…”

“…Crops and pastures are modeled together because of lack of dedicated land rent proxies 312 for each use. However, we can distinguish the shares for the two uses (see more details Agricultural and forestry rents As in Lungarska and Chakir (2018), we proxy agricultural and forestry rents by the results of two sector-specific mathematical programming models. First, the agricultural supply-side model AROPAj (Jayet et al, 2015) provides estimates for land shadow prices under current and future climate scenarios (Leclère et al, 2013).…”