Moving from reactive to proactive modelling of agricultural greenhouse gas mitigation

摘要

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture, land use, land use change and forestry (ALULUCF) are a significant percentage of UK emissions. This means that as the UK and devolved administrations set ambitious emissions reductions targets, the ALULUCF sectors will come under increasing scrutiny and pressure to reduce emissions. In order to address this, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) commissioned a project developing marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) for greenhouse gas mitigation in the ALULUCF sectors. As with many policy-relevant questions, the project constraints led to a largely reactive process with numerous enforced shortcuts in the integration process. On reflection, it is easy to identify areas where the analysis could be improved. However, accuracy comes at a cost, and a more challenging task is to identify the optimal level of analysis.