Climate and Land: Tradeoffs and Opportunities

Climate and Land: Tradeoffs and Opportunities

Land management for carbon sequestration offers an opportunity to avoid about 0.5°C of warming if landowners have full economic incentives to participate in a global greenhouse gas mitigation policy. In an energy-only policy aimed at about 550 ppm CO^2- eq stabilization the additional 0.5°C of avoided warming brings the world close to staying below the 2°C above preindustrial target. While greater incentives for mitigation from energy and land would be needed to actually meet the 2°C target even holding temperature to 2.2°C or so would be a great improvement over the path we are on now.