Food
Environment
Trade
Risk
BiorenewablesCarbon Sequestration
Objective: To explore options for reducing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, particularly using economic incentives in the agricultural sector to sequester carbon.
Consortium for Agricultural Soils Mitigation of Greenhouse Gases (CASMGS)
As part of this multi-institutional project, CARD researchers have teamed up with scientists outside of the discipline of economics to do in-depth analysis on several aspects related to carbon sequestration, including the following:
- Elucidating fundamental processes controlling the dynamic cycling of soil organic matter (SOM) to provide a basis for improving existing SOM models that predict the impact of management on changes in the long-term storage of C in SOM
- Understanding farmers' decisions on adoption of various greenhouse gas friendly cropland practices
- Developing regional and national policy impact and cost-benefit assessment tools
- Quantifying the costs of monitoring compliance with land-management contracts at three spatial scales (1:8,000, 1:16,000, 1:32,000) and by multiple verification techniques (ground-truth measurements, ground-level visual inspection, and air-photo inspection)
- Developing outreach programs, in coordination with the Cooperative Extension Service, to share information on the carbon cycle and agricultural best management practices that will be useful to agricultural producers and other interested groups
Researchers at CARD are currently assessing command-and-control policy instruments versus market-based instruments for the provision of environmental goods. The purpose is to investigate, after the fact, which policies would have been cheaper to provide the same amount of environmental goods and/or would have provided more environmental goods given the same funding. We will evaluate carbon sequestration as one of the environmental goods.