Modeling the impact of carbon farming on land use in a New Zealand landscape

Individual-Based Allometric Equations Accurately Measure Carbon Storage and Sequestration in Shrublands

“…Robust models of post-agricultural C sequestration could also have broader benefits for catchment-level environmental management. For instance, having models that provide a high degree of confidence on the potential financial gain from woody succession could help to convince landowners to retire marginal land [8]. By encouraging woody succession on erosion-prone land, this could also help reduce sedimentation and erosion, thus increasing the longevity of flood protection and water storage infrastructure.…”

“…Our results show that an individual-based allometric approach gives a high degree of confidence in C storage estimates, so that we should be able to scale up individual-based growth models to predict stand-scale C storage. Accurate models of C sequestration on abandoned agricultural land are vital to assessing the impact of future land use scenarios on greenhouse emissions management [8]. Robust models of post-agricultural C sequestration could also have broader benefits for catchment-level environmental management.…”

“…Accurate documentation of C gain during succession from shrubland to forest is vital for including abandoned agricultural land in afforestation-based emissions trading schemes. Further, accurate models of C gain during succession are needed for assessing potential C sequestration under different scenarios of land-use change [8,9], and these can, then, be used by landowners to assess economic viability of carbon farming as an alternative to traditional grazing [8].…”

Restricting new forests to conservation lands severely constrains carbon and biodiversity gains in New Zealand

“…In addition, market and policy uncertainty are thought to be highly influential in landowner decision-making. For example, a recent study showed that natural regeneration for carbon would be more profitable than grazing on 27% of agricultural lands in the area studied (Funk et al, 2014). Despite the favourable economics, actual participation was minimal (MfE, 2013).…”

“…Mason et al, 2012a). When examining potential gains we confine our investigation to the use of natural regeneration for establishing indigenous forests, as this method has been demonstrated as economically viable (Funk et al, 2014), partly because it does not require substantial capital outlay.…”