ECONOMIC AND PHYSICAL MODELING OF LAND USE IN GCAM 3.0 AND AN APPLICATION TO AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY, LAND, AND TERRESTRIAL CARBON

Marshall Wise, Kate Calvin, Page Kyle, Patrick Luckow and Jae Edmonds ()
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Marshall Wise: Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 5825 University Research Court, Suite 3500, College Park, MD 20740, USA
Kate Calvin: Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 5825 University Research Court, Suite 3500, College Park, MD 20740, USA
Page Kyle: Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 5825 University Research Court, Suite 3500, College Park, MD 20740, USA
Patrick Luckow: Synapse Energy Economics, Inc., 485 Massachusetts Ave., Suite 2, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Jae Edmonds: Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 5825 University Research Court, Suite 3500, College Park, MD 20740, USA

Climate Change Economics (CCE), 2014, vol. 05, issue 02, 1-22

Abstract: The release of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) version 3.0 represents a major revision in the treatment of agriculture and land-use activities in a model of long-term, global human and physical Earth systems. GCAM 3.0 incorporates greater spatial and temporal resolution compared to GCAM 2.0. In this paper, we document the methods embodied in the new release, describe the motivation for the changes, compare GCAM 3.0 methods to those of other long-term, global agriculture-economy models and apply GCAM 3.0 to explore the impact of changes in agricultural crop yields on global land use and terrestrial carbon. In the absence of continued crop yield improvements throughout the century, not only are cumulative carbon emissions a major source ofCO2emissions to the atmosphere, but bioenergy production remains trivial — land is needed for food. In contrast, the high crop yield improvement scenario cuts terrestrial carbon emissions dramatically and facilitates both food and energy production.

Keywords: Integrated assessment modeling; agriculture; land use; carbon cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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DOI: 10.1142/S2010007814500031

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