The Role of Irrigation in Determining the Global Land Use Impacts of Biofuels

Farzad Taheripour, Thomas Hertel and Jing Liu

GTAP Working Papers from Center for Global Trade Analysis, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University

Abstract: In recent years there has been a flurry of activity aimed at evaluating the land use consequences of biofuels programs and the associated carbon releases. In this paper we argue that these studies have tended to underestimate the ensuing land use emissions, because they have ignored the role of irrigation, and associated constraints on cropland expansion. In this paper, we develop a new general equilibrium model which distinguishes irrigated and rainfed cropping industries at a global scale. Using the new model we evaluate the implications of land use change due to US ethanol programs, in the context of physical constraints on the expansion of irrigated cropland. We find that models which mingle irrigated and rainfed areas underestimate the global land use changes induced due to the US ethanol expansion by about 5.7%. They tend to underestimate the corresponding land use emissions by more than one fifth.

Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-ene
Note: GTAP Working Paper No. 65
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu/resources/res_display.asp?RecordID=3743 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Role of Irrigation in Determining the Global Land Use Impacts of Biofuels (2011)
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:gta:workpp:3743

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GTAP Working Papers from Center for Global Trade Analysis, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jeremy Douglas ().