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Reduced benefits of climate-smart agricultural policies from land-use spillovers

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 941–948 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Agricultural practices that enhance soil carbon are increasingly being included in domestic climate strategies. The potential for these practices to affect productivity means that associated changes in land use can substantially alter net climate effects. Here we combine estimates of links between total factor productivity (TFP) and cropland use in each country with estimates of carbon emissions for cropland expansion to define TFP–emission links for each country pair. We then calculate the impact of TFP changes on both domestic and global emissions. In a scenario whereby practices reduce TFP by 5%, consistent with recent findings for cover cropping, we show that the net climate benefits of these practices are reduced in most countries—and by 70% in the United States and 80% in Europe. We also find stark contrasts between domestic and global climate impacts of TFP changes, highlighting the pitfalls of basing climate policy solely on domestic emissions targets.

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Fig. 1: Area and emissions responses to TFP change.
Fig. 2: Avoided CO2 emissions from TFP increases.
Fig. 3: The sensitivity of CO2 emissions in selected countries to domestic and foreign TFP changes.
Fig. 4: Mitigation potential of agricultural soil carbon storage in different regions.

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Data availability

The data and code used in this study are available as an R package ‘TFPtoCO2’ at https://github.com/nvilloria/TFPtoCO2.

Code availability

Codes to replicate figures are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7782534.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Hong for providing country-level committed land-use emissions estimates and T. Hertel for helpful discussions. N.B.V. acknowledges funding from US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Multistate Research Project S1072.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth System Science and Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    David B. Lobell & Nelson B. Villoria

  2. Department of Agricultural Economics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA

    David B. Lobell & Nelson B. Villoria

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  1. David B. Lobell
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  2. Nelson B. Villoria
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Contributions

D.B.L. conceived the study; D.B.L. and N.B.V. analysed data and wrote the paper; N.B.V. created R package ‘TFPtoCO2’ to accompany the paper.

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Correspondence to David B. Lobell.

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Nature Sustainability thanks William H Schlesinger and the other, anonymous, reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Lobell, D.B., Villoria, N.B. Reduced benefits of climate-smart agricultural policies from land-use spillovers. Nat Sustain 6, 941–948 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01112-w

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