Modeling the Competition for Land: Methods and Application to Climate Policy

*Chapter 7 of the forthcoming book "Economic Analysis of Land Use in Global Climate Change Policy," edited by Thomas W. Hertel, Steven Rose, and Richard S.J. Tol. The Agriculture and Land Use (AgLU) model was developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to assess the impact of a changed climate or a climate policy on land use, carbon emissions from land use change, production of field crops, and production of biofuels. The level of analysis to date is relatively aggregate, at the global or national scale, but the model captures important interactions such as endogenous land use change in response to a climate policy and international trade in agricultural and forest products. This paper describes exploratory efforts to extend the conceptual framework, including geographical disaggregation of land within the United States, improving the dynamics of the forestry sector, valuing carbon in forests, and land requirements for biofuel crops. Conceptual development is done within a single-country, steady-state version of AgLU. Land use is simulated with carbon prices from zero to $200 per t-C, with forests, biofuels, and food crops competing simultaneously for land.