Agricultural and Forestlands: U.S. Carbon Policy

Agricultural & Forestlands: U.S. Carbon Policy Strategies

Prepared for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change
September 2006

By:
Kenneth R. Richards, Indiana University
R. Neil Sampson, The Sampson Group, Inc.
Sandra Brown, Winrock International

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Foreword

The United States can capitalize on its substantial natural, institutional, and human resources to develop a strong, integrated, carbon sequestration program. The goals of a national sequestration strategy should include:

•  Achieving actual increases in carbon stocks on its forest and agricultural lands,
•  Maintaining existing carbon stocks,
•  Producing more reliable estimates of changes in the absolute levels of these stocks, and
•  Developing the methods needed to allow policy-makers to evaluate the effectiveness of government-sponsored sequestration programs.

Given the variety of activities, land types, and ownership patterns involved, policy-makers will need to include several different components in designing a national strategy for U.S. forest and agricultural lands. They will also need to draw on a variety of approaches to implement this strategy. To maximize results, government should employ the full range of policy tools at its disposal, including: direct government provision of information and increasing carbon on federal lands, regulations, practice-based incentives, and results-based mechanisms. Table 10 [4] provides a summary of the many policy tools available to the government for implementing a national carbon sequestration program. Given the multiplicity of policy tools and mechanisms available, it will be important to assure that future programs complement each other and are presented to potential participants in a lucid manner.

As a first step in increasing carbon sequestration, the government should examine how it can modify management practices on its extensive land holdings to emphasize carbon sequestration in a manner that is consistent with other land management objectives such as habitat protection, erosion control, and timber production. The most promising avenue involves reducing the risk of catastrophic loss of forests to wildfires (see Box 2, page 17). The regulatory approach, which may be particularly helpful in preserving existing forests and decreasing losses of forest carbon on private land, must be implemented through state governments where the power to directly control land-use and management is vested. Recent experience suggests that private-sector certification programs like the SFI that promote adoption of best management practices for sustainable forests can provide an important supplement to state and local regulations.

In the past, the federal government has predominantly employed practice-based incentives to influence private landowner decisions. This tendency is reflected in the 2002 Farm Bill, which contains a number of programs that provide cost-sharing incentives for practices that enhance carbon stocks on the lands where the practices are adopted. These programs generally serve multiple objectives that include soil, water, and habitat conservation in addition to carbon sequestration. The 2002 Farm Bill increased funding for these programs substantially. Practice-based incentive programs have two advantages as vehicles for promoting carbon sequestration. First, they operate through established networks of organizations to implement the policies. This reduces both the financial and political costs of shifting the focus of farm programs toward carbon sequestration. Second, practice-based programs avoid the transaction costs associated with measuring, monitoring, and tracking site-specific changes in carbon stocks. They also rely on a less intrusive monitoring process since it is only necessary to check for the existence and extent of the practice, rather than determining actual carbon stocks. Thus, practice-based programs are likely to be the most cost-effective, familiar, and feasible components of a larger national strategy to promote carbon sequestration, at least in the near term.

To fully exploit the potential of practice-based approaches, the U.S. government must assure continued funding for the relevant programs. Volatility in program funding will reduce the effectiveness of the government’s financial resources as landowners hesitate to make long-term commitments due to programmatic uncertainty. The government should also establish a high priority research initiative to evaluate the carbon benefits and cost-effectiveness of Farm Bill initiatives. In particular, the research should examine whether the programs are inducing actual changes in practices beyond what landowners would have done in the absence of incentives. As these programs mature, the government should revisit the question of whether practice-based programs should be expanded. For example, if the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) proves particularly successful, the government should consider increasing its funding level and removing the current cap of 39.2 million acres.

An important element of a national strategy will be to explore whether it is possible to develop a credible program incorporating results-based incentives for individual carbon sequestration projects. Results-based approaches have the advantage of providing high-powered incentives for innovative approaches to carbon sequestration. However, they are also less familiar than the well-established practice-based approach, and will require both overcoming information challenges and choosing among several options.

The first step to developing a program that bases incentives on the results of individual projects is to establish a viable, cost-effective method of measuring impacts of practice and land-use changes in specific locations. The government appears to have started this process with its program to reassess and redesign the 1605(b) reporting guidelines. Whether those revisions will provide guidelines that are adequate for a cap-and-trade program remains to be seen. Ultimately guidelines will need to provide methods that address development of reference cases, potential leakage, permanence, and effects on other greenhouse gases in a manner that is sufficiently clear and comprehensive so that independent evaluators of a given project will arrive at essentially the same estimate of carbon benefits.

The second step to adding a results-based approach to the national strategy is to determine how incentives will be provided to project developers. For example, the government could provide subsidies or contracts where payments to landowners are proportional to the amount of carbon actually sequestered. Alternatively, if there are caps on emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial sources, project developers might receive credits issued by the government, but the payments to project developers would come from sales of these credits to industrial sources which would use the credits to assist in meeting emissions limits.

Once key stakeholders are satisfied that methods are available that accurately assess the carbon effects of individual projects, then a results-based program for promoting carbon sequestration on agricultural and forestlands should be included in the national carbon strategy. Doing so will unleash the creativity and innovation of U.S. landowners and lead to lower overall costs of achieving national climate goals.

Opportunities for augmenting carbon sequestration may be even greater, and costs may be substantially lower, in developing countries than in the United States. Therefore, U.S. policy-makers should consider expanding the scope of a sequestration strategy to provide incentives for projects outside U.S. borders. The U.S. government could also work directly with other governments to identify, promote, and fund new policies and practices that will protect and increase carbon stocks in those countries. The incentives could be largely the same as for domestic initiatives, and could include practice-based or results-based payments. However, the process for including results from efforts in other countries in the national report would be different. Whereas the impacts of domestic initiatives would be included automatically in the inventory of national carbon stocks compiled by the United States under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, inclusion of international accomplishments would not be automatic (see Figure 1). Sequestration benefits achieved in other countries would have to be measured separately. The sum of these impacts would then be added to the national change in domestic stocks to estimate the total change in global carbon stocks for which the United States might claim credit. If the national strategy includes incentives for sequestration accomplishments in other countries, it will become even more critical to develop consistent methods for program and project evaluation.

Executive Summary

Agricultural and forestlands can play a key role as part of a comprehensive strategy to slow the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Much of the public discussion about using these lands as part of an overall strategy to address climate change results from the beliefs that forest and agriculture land-use and management options will be relatively low cost, and that biomass can play an important role in reducing the use of fossil fuels. In the near term, these lands can be managed to increase the quantity of carbon stored in soils and plant matter, thereby reducing net emissions of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. In many cases the changes in land-use management that increase carbon storage provide multiple benefits—such as erosion control, water quality protection, and improved wildlife habitat—that by themselves justify the new practices. Over longer time horizons, agricultural and forestlands can produce biomass-based substitutes for fossil fuels, thereby further reducing emissions.

This report examines the wide array of ways in which forest and agricultural lands can be managed to store or “sequester” carbon and reduce net emissions (hereafter we use the term “sequestration” for the process by which carbon is removed from the atmosphere by plants and stored in soils and trees). It discusses a range of policies and programs that would promote this objective and evaluates them in terms of their cost, environmental effectiveness, and other considerations. The results of this analysis suggest that, by carefully designing and implementing a large-scale forest and agricultural carbon sequestration strategy, the United States could substantially reduce its net carbon dioxide emissions. A successful strategy is likely to encompass a variety of initiatives at the national, state, and local levels, and to involve both government and private parties. No single approach will suffice.

Much of the infrastructure needed to increase carbon sequestration on agricultural and forestlands is already in place. To capitalize on sequestration opportunities, the federal government will need to address the full range of practices available for conserving existing carbon stocks and for promoting additional carbon uptake and storage on forest, crop, and grazing lands. A successful national strategy will also need to be responsive to the different types of land and landowners involved, to draw on the existing network of organizations, and include a variety of policy tools. On public lands, for example, government agencies, personnel, and resources can be directly deployed to pursue sequestration goals. On private land, the federal government has typically had to rely on incentives to influence land management and use. Regulatory approaches have been used on private forestlands, but have been carried out by states because of historically stiff political resistance to federal intervention in state powers to regulate land use.

There are three basic ways in which forest and agricultural lands can contribute to greenhouse gas reduction efforts: conversion of non-forestlands to forests, preserving and increasing carbon in existing forests and agricultural soils, and growing biomass to be used for energy. The costs and potential contributions associated with these three strategies vary widely. Conversion of an estimated 115 million acres of marginal agricultural lands in the United States to forests could sequester an additional 270 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon per year over a period of 100 years, at marginal costs in the rangeof $50 per metric ton of carbon ($45 per short ton1). 270 MMT of carbon stored in forests would offset nearly 20 percent of current emissions of carbon dioxide from U.S. combustion of fossil fuels. However, 115 million acres equals nearly 1/3 of currently cultivated cropland and, even though some of this conversion might be economic, conversion on this scale would require a significant federal effort and likely meet with resistance from agricultural business and rural communities. Initial national studies also suggest that up to 70 MMT could be sequestered annually on agricultural lands through modification of agricultural practices if moderate incentives were available (up to $50 per metric ton of carbon; $12.50 per metric ton CO2). In addition, with yield improvements and cost reductions in the technologies, it may be possible to offset as much as 9 to 24 percent of current emissions through use of biofuels produced at costs competitive with fossil fuels.

In a perfect world the most cost-effective practices—both source control and carbon sequestration—would be adopted first, with more costly approaches implemented successively as net emission reduction goals require. In practice, many approaches may be used simultaneously for a combination of practical, programmatic, and political reasons.

Carbon sequestration programs will not be implemented in a policy vacuum. New program design will need to take existing programs, regulations, and resources into consideration, including the large and sophisticated infrastructure that supplies the nation’s many forest and agriculture landowners with educational, technical, and financial support. A key asset that the government has at its disposal is the resourcefulness of many of these landowners. Given practical and political considerations, incentive-based approaches combined with technical assistance are the most effective and feasible policy tools the federal government will have to begin implementing a domestic carbon sequestration strategy. Moreover, the structure needed to deliver incentives for sequestration is already in place in the form of numerous programs contained in the 2002 Farm Bill, including the Conservation Security Program, the Conservation Reserve Program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program.

The government has a great deal of experience with these programs, and, although each was designed to promote specific activities or land management practices, many of the targeted practices also sequester carbon. The practice-based approaches incorporated in these programs have received broad political support. Indeed, it may well be possible to achieve substantial gains in carbon conservation and sequestration simply by relying on existing institutions and programs. In many cases, greater gains could be achieved by increasing budgets and expanding programs. Thus, the federal government should provide substantial and sustained funding for Farm Bill programs that have been successful in promoting carbon sequestration.

An alternative to providing incentives for specific activities or management practices is to employ results-based approaches that provide rewards to landowners in proportion to the actual amount of additional carbon sequestration they achieve. This approach is foreshadowed in the domestic 1605(b) voluntary reporting program. It is also reflected in the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol at the international level. The advantage of a results-based approach is that it encourages private landowners and project developers to develop innovative land-management practices that are adapted to local conditions. Rather than prescribing the sequestration practices for which the government will pay, the results-based approach frees the landowner to take whatever steps are appropriate to increase carbon stocks, and the reward is directly proportional to the accomplishment.

Incentives or rewards in a results-based program could take several forms. Two leading candidates are subsidy payments and carbon credits. A subsidy payment would take the form of an announced price—in dollars per ton—that the government would pay for carbon sequestration. This approach could be implemented by modifying existing government incentive-based programs. Alternatively, carbon credits could be established in conjunction with a “cap-and-trade” program. Large point sources such as power plants could be allowed to meet their caps, at least partially, by purchasing emission credits awarded for increasing sequestration on forest and agricultural lands. This approach would allow private landowners to receive income for sequestering carbon and would assist entities subject to emission caps to meet their targets at lower costs.

However, results-based approaches are less familiar to the agricultural and forest communities than existing programs that provide incentives for specific practices. Moreover, if credits are allocated to individual landowners under a results-based approach, the government will have to insure that there are adequate methods to provide consistent, reliable, quantified estimates of the greenhouse gas impacts of changes in land management and use. If the government can gain broad acceptance for a results-based approach, and develop the estimation protocols needed to gauge the appropriate rewards, it may be possible to unleash substantial creativity among the broad range of landowners in the United States in achieving increased carbon sequestration.

The government can employ all of the approaches described in this report—providing educational programs through its extension services, enhancing sequestration on government land, urging states to adopt regulations that encourage carbon sequestration, providing incentives for sequestration-promoting practices, and developing results-based programs—to achieve the greatest effect.

Conclusions

The United States can capitalize on its substantial natural, institutional, and human resources to develop a strong, integrated, carbon sequestration program. The goals of a national sequestration strategy should include:

•  Achieving actual increases in carbon stocks on its forest and agricultural lands,
•  Maintaining existing carbon stocks,
•  Producing more reliable estimates of changes in the absolute levels of these stocks, and
•  Developing the methods needed to allow policy-makers to evaluate the effectiveness of government-sponsored sequestration programs.

Given the variety of activities, land types, and ownership patterns involved, policy-makers will need to include several different components in designing a national strategy for U.S. forest and agricultural lands. They will also need to draw on a variety of approaches to implement this strategy. To maximize results, government should employ the full range of policy tools at its disposal, including: direct government provision of information and increasing carbon on federal lands, regulations, practice-based incentives, and results-based mechanisms. Table 10 provides a summary of the many policy tools available to the government for implementing a national carbon sequestration program. Given the multiplicity of policy tools and mechanisms available, it will be important to assure that future programs complement each other and are presented to potential participants in a lucid manner.

As a first step in increasing carbon sequestration, the government should examine how it can modify management practices on its extensive land holdings to emphasize carbon sequestration in a manner that is consistent with other land management objectives such as habitat protection, erosion control, and timber production. The most promising avenue involves reducing the risk of catastrophic loss of forests to wildfires (see Box 2, page 17). The regulatory approach, which may be particularly helpful in preserving existing forests and decreasing losses of forest carbon on private land, must be implemented through state governments where the power to directly control land-use and management is vested. Recent experience suggests that private-sector certification programs like the SFI that promote adoption of best management practices for sustainable forests can provide an important supplement to state and local regulations.

In the past, the federal government has predominantly employed practice-based incentives to influence private landowner decisions. This tendency is reflected in the 2002 Farm Bill, which contains a number of programs that provide cost-sharing incentives for practices that enhance carbon stocks on the lands where the practices are adopted. These programs generally serve multiple objectives that include soil, water, and habitat conservation in addition to carbon sequestration. The 2002 Farm Bill increased funding for these programs substantially. Practice-based incentive programs have two advantages as vehicles for promoting carbon sequestration. First, they operate through established networks of organizations to implement the policies. This reduces both the financial and political costs of shifting the focus of farm programs toward carbon sequestration. Second, practice-based programs avoid the transaction costs associated with measuring, monitoring, and tracking site-specific changes in carbon stocks. They also rely on a less intrusive monitoring process since it is only necessary to check for the existence and extent of the practice, rather than determining actual carbon stocks. Thus, practice-based programs are likely to be the most cost-effective, familiar, and feasible components of a larger national strategy to promote carbon sequestration, at least in the near term.

To fully exploit the potential of practice-based approaches, the U.S. government must assure continued funding for the relevant programs. Volatility in program funding will reduce the effectiveness of the government’s financial resources as landowners hesitate to make long-term commitments due to programmatic uncertainty. The government should also establish a high priority research initiative to evaluate the carbon benefits and cost-effectiveness of Farm Bill initiatives. In particular, the research should examine whether the programs are inducing actual changes in practices beyond what landowners would have done in the absence of incentives. As these programs mature, the government should revisit the question of whether practice-based programs should be expanded. For example, if the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) proves particularly successful, the government should consider increasing its funding level and removing the current cap of 39.2 million acres.

An important element of a national strategy will be to explore whether it is possible to develop a credible program incorporating results-based incentives for individual carbon sequestration projects. Results-based approaches have the advantage of providing high-powered incentives for innovative approaches to carbon sequestration. However, they are also less familiar than the well-established practice-based approach, and will require both overcoming information challenges and choosing among several options.

The first step to developing a program that bases incentives on the results of individual projects is to establish a viable, cost-effective method of measuring impacts of practice and land-use changes in specific locations. The government appears to have started this process with its program to reassess and redesign the 1605(b) reporting guidelines. Whether those revisions will provide guidelines that are adequate for a cap-and-trade program remains to be seen. Ultimately guidelines will need to provide methods that address development of reference cases, potential leakage, permanence, and effects on other greenhouse gases in a manner that is sufficiently clear and comprehensive so that independent evaluators of a given project will arrive at essentially the same estimate of carbon benefits.

The second step to adding a results-based approach to the national strategy is to determine how incentives will be provided to project developers. For example, the government could provide subsidies or contracts where payments to landowners are proportional to the amount of carbon actually sequestered. Alternatively, if there are caps on emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial sources, project developers might receive credits issued by the government, but the payments to project developers would come from sales of these credits to industrial sources which would use the credits to assist in meeting emissions limits.

Once key stakeholders are satisfied that methods are available that accurately assess the carbon effects of individual projects, then a results-based program for promoting carbon sequestration on agricultural and forestlands should be included in the national carbon strategy. Doing so will unleash the creativity and innovation of U.S. landowners and lead to lower overall costs of achieving national climate goals.

Opportunities for augmenting carbon sequestration may be even greater, and costs may be substantially lower, in developing countries than in the United States. Therefore, U.S. policy-makers should consider expanding the scope of a sequestration strategy to provide incentives for projects outside U.S. borders. The U.S. government could also work directly with other governments to identify, promote, and fund new policies and practices that will protect and increase carbon stocks in those countries. The incentives could be largely the same as for domestic initiatives, and could include practice-based or results-based payments. However, the process for including results from efforts in other countries in the national report would be different. Whereas the impacts of domestic initiatives would be included automatically in the inventory of national carbon stocks compiled by the United States under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, inclusion of international accomplishments would not be automatic (see Figure 1). Sequestration benefits achieved in other countries would have to be measured separately. The sum of these impacts would then be added to the national change in domestic stocks to estimate the total change in global carbon stocks for which the United States might claim credit. If the national strategy includes incentives for sequestration accomplishments in other countries, it will become even more critical to develop consistent methods for program and project evaluation.

Author Bios

Kenneth Richards
Associate Professor
School of Public and Environmental Affairs
Indiana University

Kenneth Richards is Associate Professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and Director of the IU at Oxford program. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Wharton School and a J.D. from the Law School, University of Pennsylvania. He holds an MSCE in Urban and Regional Planning, a BSCE in Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University, and a BA in Botany and Chemistry from Duke University.

Prof. Richards has served as an economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, the USDA Economic Research Service, and the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He also was the national energy planner for the Cook Islands from 1984 to 1986. His research interests include climate change policy and environmental policy implementation and management.

R. Neil Sampson
President
The Sampson Group, Inc.

R. Neil Sampson holds a B.S. degree in Agriculture (Crops and Soils) from the University of Idaho and a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University.   He is President of the Sampson Group, and a partner at Vision Forestry, LLC, a consulting firm that manages some 80,000 acres of sustainably-managed forests.  Mr. Sampson also serves as a Research Scientist with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, as Affiliate Professor in the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Idaho, and as technical Advisor to the Utility Forest Carbon Management Program of Edison Electric Institute, the International Carbon Mitigation Program of The Nature Conservancy, and the National Carbon Offset Coalition.  He also serves as Executive Secretary of the External Review Panel to the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, sponsored by the American Forest & Paper Association.

He has authored two books on soil conservation, and edited many books on natural resource topics in addition to publishing over 100 scientific and popular articles on natural resource topics.    

Prior to becoming President of the Sampson Group, Mr. Sampson’s career included service with the Soil Conservation Service (now Natural Resources Conservation Service), the National Association of Conservation Districts, and the American Forestry Association (now American Forests). In 2001, he was the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Visiting Fellow at the Yale School.   He periodically serves as an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech’s Northern Virginia Campus.

Sandra Brown
Senior Scientist
Winrock International
Ecosystem Services Unit

Sandra Brown has a PhD in systems ecology from the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences, University of Florida, a MS. in engineering science from the University of South Florida, and a BS in chemistry from the University of Nottingham, England. She has been employed as Senior Scientist in the Ecosystems Services Unit of Winrock International since 1998. Prior to joining Winrock, she was a Professor in the Department of Forestry at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.  Dr. Brown has more than 25 years of experience in planning, developing, implementing, and managing government and private-sector-funded projects focusing on understanding the role of forests in the global carbon cycle and their present and potential future role in climate change and mitigation This work has resulted in more than 180 peer-reviewed publications, including five chapters in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports where was the a co-convening lead author.

Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change

The vast lands of the United States offer significant opportunities to contribute to solving the problem of climate change. At costs well under $100 per ton of carbon, it may be possible to offset nearly 20 percent of current U.S. carbon dioxide emissions through reforesting marginal agricultural lands and restoring carbon to agricultural soils through practices such as no-till and improved crop rotations. Emissions can also be reduced by substituting biomass energy for fossil fuels and by reducing the intensity of wildfires through thinning and removing excess debris. However, for U.S. forest and agricultural lands to play a significant role in curbing climate change, a substantial national policy commitment will be necessary.

This report reviews the available resources and considers the range of policy approaches that would include U.S. forest and agricultural lands in a domestic policy. Kenneth Richards, Neil Sampson, and Sandra Brown identify four basic policy approaches and find that different approaches are suited to different lands. The approaches also vary with regard to who bears the implementation costs—the public at large or specific groups within it—and in expected magnitude of results. For these reasons, a successful forest and agricultural lands program will require some mix of the four approaches:

• Changing practices on public lands,
• Land use regulations on privately owned forestlands,
• Practice-based incentives for forest and agricultural lands, and
• Results-based incentives for forest and agricultural lands.

They find that:

• U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that encourage best practices are familiar to and popular with farmers and forestland owners. As a result, we should evaluate those programs and expand the most effective ones.

• We need to do a better job of having landowners, rather than the government, be the ones to determine what information they need.

• Regulation of private land is primarily an opportunity for state and local government rather than the federal government.

• Results-based incentives, i.e., offering payments per ton of sequestered carbon, can encourage more cost-effective and innovative approaches, but will require development and agreement on consistent and reliable accounting methods.

So how should this inform policy-making? First, we should include land-based sequestration in federal legislation, including the Farm Bill and proposals that address climate change. Second, we should promote opportunities for farmers to move from traditional crop support to environmental and energy-security goals. Third, we should be managing large tracts of forestland sustainably, thus providing both for sequestration and habitat.

This report is being released with a companion report, The Role of Agriculture in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation. While this paper focuses on policy options, the companion report reviews the economic and technological opportunities available to farmers—including using cropland to produce biofuels—and estimates the greenhouse gas reductions that could be achieved. Taken together, these reports provide a comprehensive review of the role of U.S. forest and agricultural lands in a domestic climate change program. The Pew Center and the authors would like to express appreciation to Craig Cox, Debbie Reed and Brent Sohngen for reviewing and providing suggestions on an early draft of this report.

Executive Summary

Agricultural and forestlands can play a key role as part of a comprehensive strategy to slow the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Much of the public discussion about using these lands as part of an overall strategy to address climate change results from the beliefs that forest and agriculture land-use and management options will be relatively low cost, and that biomass can play an important role in reducing the use of fossil fuels. In the near term, these lands can be managed to increase the quantity of carbon stored in soils and plant matter, thereby reducing net emissions of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. In many cases the changes in land-use management that increase carbon storage provide multiple benefits—such as erosion control, water quality protection, and improved wildlife habitat—that by themselves justify the new practices. Over longer time horizons, agricultural and forestlands can produce biomass-based substitutes for fossil fuels, thereby further reducing emissions.

This report examines the wide array of ways in which forest and agricultural lands can be managed to store or “sequester” carbon and reduce net emissions (hereafter we use the term “sequestration” for the process by which carbon is removed from the atmosphere by plants and stored in soils and trees). It discusses a range of policies and programs that would promote this objective and evaluates them in terms of their cost, environmental effectiveness, and other considerations. The results of this analysis suggest that, by carefully designing and implementing a large-scale forest and agricultural carbon sequestration strategy, the United States could substantially reduce its net carbon dioxide emissions. A successful strategy is likely to encompass a variety of initiatives at the national, state, and local levels, and to involve both government and private parties. No single approach will suffice.

Much of the infrastructure needed to increase carbon sequestration on agricultural and forestlands is already in place. To capitalize on sequestration opportunities, the federal government will need to address the full range of practices available for conserving existing carbon stocks and for promoting additional carbon uptake and storage on forest, crop, and grazing lands. A successful national strategy will also need to be responsive to the different types of land and landowners involved, to draw on the existing network of organizations, and include a variety of policy tools. On public lands, for example, government agencies, personnel, and resources can be directly deployed to pursue sequestration goals. On private land, the federal government has typically had to rely on incentives to influence land management and use. Regulatory approaches have been used on private forestlands, but have been carried out by states because of historically stiff political resistance to federal intervention in state powers to regulate land use.

There are three basic ways in which forest and agricultural lands can contribute to greenhouse gas reduction efforts: conversion of non-forestlands to forests, preserving and increasing carbon in existing forests and agricultural soils, and growing biomass to be used for energy. The costs and potential contributions associated with these three strategies vary widely. Conversion of an estimated 115 million acres of marginal agricultural lands in the United States to forests could sequester an additional 270 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon per year over a period of 100 years, at marginal costs in the rangeof $50 per metric ton of carbon ($45 per short ton1). 270 MMT of carbon stored in forests would offset nearly 20 percent of current emissions of carbon dioxide from U.S. combustion of fossil fuels. However, 115 million acres equals nearly 1/3 of currently cultivated cropland and, even though some of this conversion might be economic, conversion on this scale would require a significant federal effort and likely meet with resistance from agricultural business and rural communities. Initial national studies also suggest that up to 70 MMT could be sequestered annually on agricultural lands through modification of agricultural practices if moderate incentives were available (up to $50 per metric ton of carbon; $12.50 per metric ton CO2). In addition, with yield improvements and cost reductions in the technologies, it may be possible to offset as much as 9 to 24 percent of current emissions through use of biofuels produced at costs competitive with fossil fuels.

In a perfect world the most cost-effective practices—both source control and carbon sequestration—would be adopted first, with more costly approaches implemented successively as net emission reduction goals require. In practice, many approaches may be used simultaneously for a combination of practical, programmatic, and political reasons.

Carbon sequestration programs will not be implemented in a policy vacuum. New program design will need to take existing programs, regulations, and resources into consideration, including the large and sophisticated infrastructure that supplies the nation’s many forest and agriculture landowners with educational, technical, and financial support. A key asset that the government has at its disposal is the resourcefulness of many of these landowners. Given practical and political considerations, incentive-based approaches combined with technical assistance are the most effective and feasible policy tools the federal government will have to begin implementing a domestic carbon sequestration strategy. Moreover, the structure needed to deliver incentives for sequestration is already in place in the form of numerous programs contained in the 2002 Farm Bill, including the Conservation Security Program, the Conservation Reserve Program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program.

The government has a great deal of experience with these programs, and, although each was designed to promote specific activities or land management practices, many of the targeted practices also sequester carbon. The practice-based approaches incorporated in these programs have received broad political support. Indeed, it may well be possible to achieve substantial gains in carbon conservation and sequestration simply by relying on existing institutions and programs. In many cases, greater gains could be achieved by increasing budgets and expanding programs. Thus, the federal government should provide substantial and sustained funding for Farm Bill programs that have been successful in promoting carbon sequestration.

An alternative to providing incentives for specific activities or management practices is to employ results-based approaches that provide rewards to landowners in proportion to the actual amount of additional carbon sequestration they achieve. This approach is foreshadowed in the domestic 1605(b) voluntary reporting program. It is also reflected in the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol at the international level. The advantage of a results-based approach is that it encourages private landowners and project developers to develop innovative land-management practices that are adapted to local conditions. Rather than prescribing the sequestration practices for which the government will pay, the results-based approach frees the landowner to take whatever steps are appropriate to increase carbon stocks, and the reward is directly proportional to the accomplishment.

Incentives or rewards in a results-based program could take several forms. Two leading candidates are subsidy payments and carbon credits. A subsidy payment would take the form of an announced price—in dollars per ton—that the government would pay for carbon sequestration. This approach could be implemented by modifying existing government incentive-based programs. Alternatively, carbon credits could be established in conjunction with a “cap-and-trade” program. Large point sources such as power plants could be allowed to meet their caps, at least partially, by purchasing emission credits awarded for increasing sequestration on forest and agricultural lands. This approach would allow private landowners to receive income for sequestering carbon and would assist entities subject to emission caps to meet their targets at lower costs.

However, results-based approaches are less familiar to the agricultural and forest communities than existing programs that provide incentives for specific practices. Moreover, if credits are allocated to individual landowners under a results-based approach, the government will have to insure that there are adequate methods to provide consistent, reliable, quantified estimates of the greenhouse gas impacts of changes in land management and use. If the government can gain broad acceptance for a results-based approach, and develop the estimation protocols needed to gauge the appropriate rewards, it may be possible to unleash substantial creativity among the broad range of landowners in the United States in achieving increased carbon sequestration.

The government can employ all of the approaches described in this report—providing educational programs through its extension services, enhancing sequestration on government land, urging states to adopt regulations that encourage carbon sequestration, providing incentives for sequestration-promoting practices, and developing results-based programs—to achieve the greatest effect.

Conclusions