• Corpus ID: 132462453

Greenhouse gas mitigation in land use - measuring economic potential.

@inproceedings{Moran2010GreenhouseGM,
  title={Greenhouse gas mitigation in land use - measuring economic potential.},
  author={Dominic Moran and Kimberley Pratt},
  year={2010}
}

• D. Moran, K. Pratt
• Published 2010
• Economics

INTRODUCTION As noted in other sections the global technical mitigation potential of agriculture, excluding fossil fuel, offsets from biomass is around 5.5–6 Gt CO2eq/year. This can be delivered through a range of technically effective measures that can be deployed in a variety of farm and land-use systems. These measures can be deployed at varying cost, including a range of ancillary environmental and social costs and benefits that need to be taken into account when moving to some consideration of the socio-economic potential of mitigation pathways. This chapter will explore the distinction between the technical and economic potential as applied more generally to land-use mitigation measures. Specifically, the chapter considers how issues of efficiency and equity are important corollaries to the effectiveness of grassland mitigation. The consideration of efficiency is made with reference to a carbon (C) price, which provides a benchmark cost for comparing mitigation options on a cost per tonne basis. The equity dimension then addresses the distributional impacts arising if efficient measures are adopted across different income groups. We demonstrate these points with the example of biochar, a soils additive that is widely considered to offer a low-cost mitigation potential applicable in a wide variety of highand low-income farm and land use systems. This example is used to illustrate the data requirements for developing a bottom-up marginal abatement cost curve, which is essential for judging the relative effectiveness and efficient of mitigation measures.