Foreword

Agricultural & Forestlands: U.S. Carbon Policy Strategies

Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change

The vast lands of the United States offer significant opportunities to contribute to solving the problem of climate change. At costs well under $100 per ton of carbon, it may be possible to offset nearly 20 percent of current U.S. carbon dioxide emissions through reforesting marginal agricultural lands and restoring carbon to agricultural soils through practices such as no-till and improved crop rotations. Emissions can also be reduced by substituting biomass energy for fossil fuels and by reducing the intensity of wildfires through thinning and removing excess debris. However, for U.S. forest and agricultural lands to play a significant role in curbing climate change, a substantial national policy commitment will be necessary.

This report reviews the available resources and considers the range of policy approaches that would include U.S. forest and agricultural lands in a domestic policy. Kenneth Richards, Neil Sampson, and Sandra Brown identify four basic policy approaches and find that different approaches are suited to different lands. The approaches also vary with regard to who bears the implementation costs—the public at large or specific groups within it—and in expected magnitude of results. For these reasons, a successful forest and agricultural lands program will require some mix of the four approaches:

• Changing practices on public lands,
• Land use regulations on privately owned forestlands,
• Practice-based incentives for forest and agricultural lands, and
• Results-based incentives for forest and agricultural lands.

They find that:

• U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that encourage best practices are familiar to and popular with farmers and forestland owners. As a result, we should evaluate those programs and expand the most effective ones.

• We need to do a better job of having landowners, rather than the government, be the ones to determine what information they need.

• Regulation of private land is primarily an opportunity for state and local government rather than the federal government.

• Results-based incentives, i.e., offering payments per ton of sequestered carbon, can encourage more cost-effective and innovative approaches, but will require development and agreement on consistent and reliable accounting methods.

So how should this inform policy-making? First, we should include land-based sequestration in federal legislation, including the Farm Bill and proposals that address climate change. Second, we should promote opportunities for farmers to move from traditional crop support to environmental and energy-security goals. Third, we should be managing large tracts of forestland sustainably, thus providing both for sequestration and habitat.

This report is being released with a companion report, The Role of Agriculture in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation. While this paper focuses on policy options, the companion report reviews the economic and technological opportunities available to farmers—including using cropland to produce biofuels—and estimates the greenhouse gas reductions that could be achieved. Taken together, these reports provide a comprehensive review of the role of U.S. forest and agricultural lands in a domestic climate change program. The Pew Center and the authors would like to express appreciation to Craig Cox, Debbie Reed and Brent Sohngen for reviewing and providing suggestions on an early draft of this report.