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Report Contents Report#:EIA/DOE-0573(98)
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Land Use and the Kyoto Protocol Overview Land use and forestry issues are important to the global and national inventories of greenhouse gases in two ways:
Land use issues are of particular interest to the United States because U.S. forests and soils annually sequester large amounts of carbon dioxide. Much of the forest land in the United States was cleared for agriculture, lumber, or fuel in the hundred years prior to 1920. Since then, much agricultural and pastureland has reverted to forest land, and is now covered with relatively young, rapidly growing trees. The amount of carbon being sequestered annually is uncertain. In part, this uncertainty is due to the absence of data or difficulties in measuring sequestration. In addition to the technical uncertainty, however, there is also policy or accounting ambiguity about which aspects of the biological carbon cycle ought to be included in national inventories as anthropogenic emissions and removals. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Revised Guidelines for National Emissions Inventories, promulgated pursuant to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, contains a set of rules governing the inclusion of carbon sequestration and land use in national inventories.(86) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), relying heavily on the work of U.S. Forest Service Researchers Richard Birdsey and Linda Heath, estimates annual U.S. carbon sequestration (generally defined according to the IPCC guidelines) at 209 million metric tons carbon equivalent (Table 33).(87) Under the IPCC guidelines, this quantity would be treated as an offset to gross greenhouse gas emissions from other sources. Table 33. Net Carbon flux from Land Use Change and Forestry, 1990-1997 Articles 3.3 and 3.4 of the Kyoto Protocol include provisions for the inclusion of carbon sequestration from land use changes and forestry. The Protocol requires that national emissions and sequestration be estimated in accord with guidelines and methods promulgated by the IPCC. There are differences, however, between forestry accounting methods implied by the Kyoto Protocol and the IPCC Guidelines, which make it difficult to determine the amount of greenhouse gas emissions and reductions attributable to land use that should be included. For example, national estimates for annual greenhouse gas fluxes from grassland, pastureland, rangeland, and cropland are required by the IPCC Guidelines but are absent from the Kyoto Protocol. Table 34 highlights some of the key areas where the IPCC guidelines differ from the Kyoto Protocol in terms of the type of land use change and forestry data included in each. The IPCC Guidelines recommend an inclusive "carbon cycle" approach to measuring net fluxes, which are then treated as an offset to emissions from other sources. This approach encourages reporting of all relevant sources and sinks, even if the data are poor or measurement is difficult. The IPCC guidelines also require identical accounting for all years, including 1990. In an "IPCC compliant" inventory, Table 33 would be deducted from gross emissions in Table ES2 (in the Executive Summary) to produce a net emissions figure for the United States. In addition, carbon sources and sinks from relevant sources not included in Table 33 (for example, carbon sequestered or released by agricultural soils) would also be eligible for inclusion in the inventory. The Kyoto Protocol appears to limit the extent to which the array of sources and sinks listed in the IPCC guidelines would be counted for compliance purposes. The most fundamental difference is found in Articles 3.3. 3.4, and 3.7 of the Protocol, which permit countries with net forestry sinks (like the United States) to exclude forestry sinks from their emissions. However, countries with net sinks are permitted to add a portion of their sequestration from land use change and forestry to their "assigned amount" in the 2008-2013 commitment period. Thus, land use change and forestry can still act as an offset to emissions under some circumstances. The circumstances are listed in Article 3.3 of the Protocol: "Direct human-induced land use change and forestry activities" places increased emphasis on the anthropogenic nature of the activity, because not all carbon sequestration may be considered "anthropogenic." Also, the inclusion of the term "direct" may exclude carbon stored in or emitted from harvested wood. "Afforestation, deforestation, and reforestation" may exclude changes in land use not affecting forest lands, such as grassland conversion or carbon sequestered in agricultural soils, and also may exclude unharvested forest land subject to forest management practices. Article 3.4 identifies emissions and sinks from "agricultural soils" as a different category from "land use change and forestry," which would tend to reinforce the interpretation of this clause as excluding non-forestry activities. "Since 1990" may limit coverage to only that portion of U.S. forests subject to "afforestation, deforestation, and reforestation since 1990" but not before that date. Specific tracts may need to be identified. Because much of the commercial forest in the United States is harvested regularly on a multi-decade cropping cycle, this would still be a large area, but it would exclude park and wilderness areas. "Measured and verifiable" may exclude some or all changes in soil carbon, either because soil carbon may not be deemed measurable and verifiable, or because some of the accumulation is occurring on land that does not qualify for inclusion under the Protocol, or both. More than 50 percent of the carbon in U.S. forest ecosystems is found in the soil; however, the IPCC guideline category "Change in Soil Content" includes only soil carbon on non-forest land. The Kyoto Protocol limits reporting to activities deemed "measurable and verifiable." Some of what Article 3.3 takes away, Article 3.4 may potentially return. Article 3.4 requires the Conference of the Parties to ". . . decide upon modalities, rules and guidelines as to how, and which, additional human-induced activities related to changes in greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks in the agricultural soils and the land-use change and forestry categories shall be added to, or subtracted from, the assigned amounts for Parties included in Annex I . . . . Such a decision shall apply in the second and subsequent commitment periods. A Party may choose to apply such a decision on these additional human-induced activities for its first commitment period, provided that these activities have taken place since 1990."(89) Thus, the development of better information about soil carbon emissions and sequestration and the development of internationally accepted practices for actions such as measuring carbon cycle emissions and sequestration and carbon sequestered in agricultural soils may ultimately open a pathway for their inclusion as a tool for managing greenhouse gas emissions. Recent research suggests that carbon sequestration in agricultural soils may be a useful method of offsetting carbon emissions from fossil fuels (see discussion on "Carbon Sequestered in Agricultural Soils). Both the IPCC guidelines and the Kyoto Protocol approach present formidable complexities for the United States and other Framework Convention signatories in actually developing and collecting relevant information. Thus, Kyoto signatories have agreed to defer the negotiation of an agreed interpretation of the land use change and forestry provisions of the Kyoto Protocol. They commissioned a new IPCC study of the topic, to be completed before June 2000.(90) The United States would need better coverage of non-forest lands plus new analytical methods in order to prepare a national inventory under the Framework Convention that includes all of the land categories listed under the IPCC guidelines; however, this is not the only difficulty in applying the guidelines to available U.S. forestry data. The IPCC guidelines require that, in the event that land use changes (for example, from forest to pasture), the change in carbon stocks caused by that change be calculated. However, U.S. forestry data on national land use totals by land use type are available only at 5-year intervals, so that one can determine the net change of land use in a particular category but cannot ascertain how much land was converted from one use to another. Hence, a rigorous application of the IPCC guidelines would require, in effect, tracking individual plots of land rather than the sampling approach actually used. In order to use carbon sequestration to help comply with the Kyoto Protocol, the United States would need information from which carbon emissions and sequestration of specific tracts of land subject to afforestation, deforestation, and reforestation since 1990 could be calculated. Even if only a few such tracts were identified ("activities" are defined as individual projects), the problem could become more manageable. In contrast, if the standard covered all qualifying tracts on a national basis, it would require much more detailed land use statistics than the United States currently collects. More frequent data collection would be also necessary to ascertain U.S. carbon sequestration from land use during the Kyoto commitment period. At present, the most important statistics on forest and other land necessary for estimates of greenhouse gas fluxes in the United States are updated by the USDA Forest Service only once every 5 years, and full reports containing the data are released once every 10 years.(92) |
