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Climate Mitigation And The Future Of Tropical Landscapes, A Thomson, Katherine V. Calvin, L P. Chini, George C. Hurtt, James A. Edmonds, B Bond-Lamberty, Steve Frolking, Marshall A. Wise, A Janetos

Earth Sciences

Land-use change to meet 21st-century demands for food, fuel, and fiber will depend on many interactive factors, including global policies limiting anthropogenic climate change and realized improvements in agricultural productivity. Climate-change mitigation policies will alter the decision-making environment for land management, and changes in agricultural productivity will influence cultivated land expansion. We explore to what extent future increases in agricultural productivity might offset conversion of tropical forest lands to crop lands under a climate mitigation policy and a contrasting no-policy scenario in a global integrated assessment model. The Global Change Assessment Model is applied here to simulate a mitigation policy …