Climate induced land use change in France: impacts of agricultural adaptation and climate change mitigation

In: Ecological Economics (147), 134-154. (2018)

Open Access

Abstract

Interaction between mitigation and adaptation is a key question for the design of climate policies. In this paper, we study how land use adaptation to climate change impacts land use competition in the agriculture, forest and other land use (AFOLU) sector and how a mitigation policy in agriculture might affect this competition. We use for this purpose two sector-specific bio-economic models of agriculture and forest combined with an econometric land use shares model to simulate the impacts of two climate change scenarios (A2 and B1, 2100 horizon), and a greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture policy consisting of a tax of between 0 and 200 e/tCO2 equivalent. Our results show that both climate change scenarios lead to an increase in the area devoted to agriculture at the expense of forest which could have a negative impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. The mitigation policy would curtail agricultural expansion, and thus could counteract the effects of land use adaptation to climate change. In other words, accounting for land use competition results in a reduction of the abatement costs of the mitigation policy in the agricultural sector. ; Les auteurs s'intéressent aux changements d'usages des sols induits par le changement climatique en France à l'horizon 2100 (scénario A2 et B1 du GIEC). L'analyse prend en compte l'adaptation des agents économiques et évalue les effets des politiques publiques visant à réduire les émissions des gaz à effets de serre d'origine agricole. Les résultats de ce travail montre que les coûts d'atténuation subits par les agriculteurs sont inférieurs lorsque l'on intègre la dimension changement d'usage des sols.