Antle, John M. Capalbo, Susan M. Mooney, Sian Elliot, Edward Paustian, Keith
Abstract
Under the Kyoto protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change the United States is charged with reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to seven percent below their 1990 levels by the period 2008-2012. These reductions could be met from many industries including agriculture. In this paper, an economic simulation model is linked to the CENTURY ecosystem model to quantify the economic efficiency of policies that might be used to sequester carbon (C) in agricultural soils in the Northern Great Plains region. Model outputs are combined to assess the costs of inducing changes in equilibrium levels of soil C through three types of policies. The first is a CRP-style policy that provides producers with per-acre payments for converting crop-land to permanent grass; the second is a policy that provides per-acre payments to all farmers that use continuous cropping, regardless of the land's cropping history; the third is a policy that provides per-acre payments for the use of continuous cropping only on land units that had previously been in a crop/fallow rotation. The analysis shows that a CRP-style policy is found to be an inefficient means to increase soil C resulting in costs that typically exceed $100 per MT (metric ton) of C. In contrast, payments to adopt continuous cropping were found to produce increases in soil C for between $5 to $70/MT depending on the geographic area and degree of targeting of the payments. The most efficient, lowest cost policy is achieved when payments are targeted to land that was previously in a crop/fallow rotation. In this range, soil C sequestration appears to be competitive with C sequestered from other sources.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) in its series 2000 Annual meeting, July 30-August 2, Tampa, FL with number
21879.
Length: Date of creation: 2000 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea00:21879
Contact details of provider: Postal: 555 East Wells Street, Suite 1100, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202 Phone: (414) 918-3190 Fax: (414) 276-3349 Email: Web page: http://www.aaea.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (AgEcon Search).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: