Consumption-based accounts of emissions from land-use change

The volume of international trade is growing rapidly. This also holds for products from agriculture and forestry such as food, bioenergy or timber. As a consequence, the place where products are consumed is often far away from the place where land use occurs. A considerable fraction of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions results from land-use and land- cover change. Release or uptake of carbon from the atmosphere resulting from land-use change was a major fraction of all anthropogenic GHG emissions only a few decades ago, and still accounts for approximately 10% today. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions may be achieved through changes in production (e.g. fuel substitution) or through changes in consumption (e.g. changes in the amount and qualities of products that are consumed). While carbon footprint accounts of consumption have meanwhile become available for GHG emissions resulting from industrial processes, such accounts are lacking for the carbon emissions related to land-use change. CoBALUCE helps to close this gap by creating comprehensive accounts of carbon emissions from land- use change. The aim is allocate 80-90% of all land-related carbon emissions (respectively carbon sequestration) to the consumption of individual biomass (food, feed, material bioenergy) products for a global 30 year time series. This is achieved by tracing bilateral trade flows between any set of countries at the level of products. Major challenges which are addressed relate to the fact that carbon emissions (or uptake) of land also hinge on land-use history (legacy effects), which greatly hampers unequivocal attribution of emissions to products. Toward that end, the project explores strengths and weaknesses of different possible allocation rules in a high-level expert meeting and implements the most promising options, based on the databases created in the research process. By establishing a solid and comprehensive database on land-use change emissions of biomass products, CoBALUCE helps underpinning international climate policies related to the consumption of land-based products. For instance, the database provides insights into which nations disproportionally benefit from international trade and are therefore able to lower pressure on their domestic environment, and on the other hand, for which nations the opposite is the case.