The economics of decarbonizing Costa Rica's agriculture, forestry and other land uses sectors

Onil Banerjee, Martín Cicowiez, Renato Vargas, Edmundo Molina-Perez, Kenneth J. Bagstad and Žiga Malek

Ecological Economics, 2024, vol. 218, issue C

Abstract: In 2018, Costa Rica demonstrated its commitment to the Paris Agreement and published its Decarbonization Plan for achieving zero net emissions by the year 2050. We evaluate the impacts of the country's strategy for decarbonizing its Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses (AFOLU) sectors by coupling the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling framework with high-resolution spatial land use-land cover change and ecosystem services modeling (IEEM+ESM). Our results show that decarbonization of AFOLU would simultaneously enhance carbon storage, water purification, water regulation and erosion mitigation ecosystem services. Moreover, the positive cumulative wealth impact of decarbonization would be approximately US$7.27 billion by 2050 while lifting an additional 3810 individuals out of poverty. From a public investment perspective, decarbonization would have a fiscally neutral impact with the economic benefits sufficient in magnitude to off-set policy implementation costs and generate economic returns of over US$852 million when changes in natural capital stocks and environmental quality are considered. This application to Costa Rica is the first integrated economy-wide analysis of a growing number of decarbonization plans globally. The IEEM+ESM approach provides an integrated framework for analyzing decarbonization plans and can be used to refine AFOLU mitigation strategies to capitalize on synergies and minimize negative trade-offs across the three dimensions of wealth and sustainable economic development, namely economy, society and the environment.

Keywords: Decarbonization; Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses (AFOLU); Climate change mitigation; Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling (IEEM) Platform; Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model; Ecosystem services modeling; Land use-land cover change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924000120
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:218:y:2024:i:c:s0921800924000120

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108115

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().