Climate change threatens agricultural productivity worldwide, resulting in higher food prices. Associated economic gains and losses differ not only by region but also between producers and consumers and are affected by market dynamics. On the basis of an impact modeling chain, starting with 19 different climate projections that drive plant biophysical process simulations and ending with agro-economic decisions, this analysis focuses on distributional effects of high-end climate change impacts across geographic regions and across economic agents.

Land-use change, mainly the conversion of tropical forests to agricultural land, is a massive source of carbon emissions and contributes substantially to global warming. Therefore, mechanisms that aim to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation are widely discussed. A central challenge is the avoidance of international carbon leakage if forest conservation is not implemented globally.

The land-use sector can contribute to climate change mitigation not only by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but also by increasing carbon uptake from the atmosphere and thereby creating negative CO2 emissions. In this paper, we investigate two land-based climate change mitigation strategies for carbon removal: afforestation and bioenergy in combination with carbon capture and storage technology (bioenergy CCS).

Generating energy from crops instead of oil and coal can have counterproductive effects. “The use of biomass can lead to additional emissions of greenhouse gases”, says lead author Alexander Popp of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “This is the case if forests get cut down to plant energy crops instead.” Forests are important CO2 sinks. At the same time, biomass is expected to play an important role in  future energy systems.

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/3/034017/fulltext