Climate Change Interactions with Agriculture, Forestry Sequestration, and Food Security

Abstract

Climate change can negatively affect crop productivity decreasing food production in many regions across the world. Literature suggests forest carbon sequestration (FCS) is a good alternative to mitigate climate change due to its ability to sequester carbon at low cost. Nevertheless, FCS subsidies have not been addressed together with impacts on food security and climate change reduced crop yields. In our multidisciplinary work, we collected the crop yield shocks from global circulation—crop modeling. We also developed a new version of a computable general equilibrium model for the economic analysis. Thus, we evaluate the global economic impacts of using carbon taxes and FCS to achieve 50% emission reductions. We find that implementing an aggressive FCS incentive can cause substantial increases in food prices because of land competition between forest and crop production. Without climate induced yield reductions, FCS is attractive, but not with the yield reductions. With the climate induced yield shocks, food price increases are huge—so large that it is clear this approach could not be adopted in the real world. The results cry out for investment in agricultural research on climate adaptation. Our findings suggest economic well-being falls more without mitigation than with 50% emission reductions.