Potential Contribution of Land-Use Change to Climate Policy: A Spatio-Temporal Analysis in an Australian Catchment

Abstract

Since the industrial revolution, atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) have been steadily increasing due to anthropogenic activities. A large body of literature concludes that this increase in atmospheric GHG concentrations is contributing to the warming of the globe, with progressively warmer average global surface temperatures experienced over the past three decades. Continued increases are predicted to cause adverse social, economic and ecosystem impacts in the near future. To limit these impacts, it is vital to implement low-cost strategies to reduce emissions. There is strong evidence of the significant potential of trees planted on agricultural land as a low-cost abatement method to sequester atmospheric carbon, the main contributing GHG. However, there is significant disparity between the estimated and realised uptake of this activity by Australian landholders. For landholders to adopt GHG mitigating strategies it will be necessary for them to receive incentives adequate to cover abatement and transaction costs. In this thesis, the potential for and economic feasibility of different land-use options to produce carbon offsets are assessed using spatio-temporal simulation models developed at differing levels of resolution, ranging from 1.1 km2 cells in a spatial grid to the farm scale. The models are applied to a case study catchment, the Border Rivers-Gwydir in New South Wales, Australia. Four different analyses are undertaken and are presented as stand-alone chapters in the thesis; each in the format of a journal article. Although these chapters may be read independently, they build upon each other in a series of increasingly complex applications.