Land Use Change
Calculating greenhouse gas emissions from land use change
Deforestation is one of the major issues facing the global agriculture production system, with as much 8% of global CO2 emissions being attributable to land use change. A well-known example is deforestation for the cultivation of crops such as soybean and oil palm. Many publications have focussed (rightfully so) on this issue and have provided solid global or country specific estimations of CO2 emissions due to land use change based on available statistics and/or satellite imagery
Challenge: availability of primary dataA big challenge for Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) researchers is to translate this impact of land use change to specific crops from specific countries while little primary data is available. Our ‘Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool’ is specifically designed to address this challenge. Land use change in Agri-footprint has been calculated using the "Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool 2016.1" that was developed alongside the PAS 2050-1 (BSI, 2012). The impact of Land Use Change (LUC) on climate change is included in Agri-footprint as a separate flow, allowing users to choose to include LUC or not. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) practitioners can easily include LUC in their sensitivity analysis if they wish. The comprehensive model used is the PAS 2050-1: Land Use Change Assessment Tool.
More about the Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool
Update: version 2018In December 2018 the Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool has been updated. In this update we incorporated the latest data from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) up to 2016. Many of the background data have changed, such as areas reported, forest area statistics, and estimations of biomass carbon stock in forests. Furthermore, we made a correction in the way the emissions are calculated so that the results are fully compliant to the PAS 2050-1. In previous versions the calculations slightly deviated in some details form the PAS 2050-1 requirements which only in some specific cases has impact on the results.
References to the toolThe ‘Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool’ has grown in past years based on the PAS2050 and specifically the PAS2050-1 frameworks, the basic methodology of which is now widely referenced in. Examples are the PEF guidelines & Envifood protocol. It is the most comprehensive implementation of a methodology for GHG emissions from direct land use change that is widely applied.
The tool provides three basic functionalities,
based on three different approaches related to data availability of the user.
Country known & land use unknown
This estimate is based on a number of reference scenarios for previous land use, combined with data from relative crop land expansions based on FAOSTAT.
Country & land use unknown
A weighted average is determined based on FAO statistics, using the same methodology as in ‘country know & land use unknown’ for calculating the GHG emissions for each relevant country.
Country & land use known
These approaches are described in the PAS 2050-1 published by BSI and are made operational in this tool using various IPCC data sources.
Complete dataset is now availableThe complete dataset version 2018 (9.000+ country- crop combinations) is now available for you and your organisation.
Excel toolIt is also possible to get a license for the complete and most recent Excel tool (version 2018).
Quotation is available on request.
Learn more: Download the update description (version 2018)Download the upate description (version 2018) and read more about the Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool version 2018
Via our Tool Portal you will get access to:
most up-to-date dataset (all possible crop- country combinations 'country known; land use unknown).