[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/aaea11/103843.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Role of Irrigation in Determining the Global Land Use Impacts of Biofuels

Author

Listed:
  • Taheripour, Farzad
  • Hertel, Thomas W.
  • Liu, Jing
Abstract
In recent years there has been a flurry of activity aimed at evaluating the land use consequences of biofuels programs and the associated carbon releases. In this paper we argue that these studies have tended to underestimate the ensuing land use change, because they have ignored the role of irrigation, and associated constraints on cropland expansion. In this paper, we develop a new general equilibrium model which distinguishes irrigated and rainfed cropping industries at a global scale. Using the new model we evaluate the implications of land use change due to US ethanol programs, in the context of short run constraints on the expansion of irrigated cropland. Since irrigated area tends to offer a higher yield than its rainfed counterpart, this provides an upper bound on the change in cropland following biofuel expansion. We find that the biofuel-induced expansion in global cropland cover is about 16 percent larger when the irrigation constraint is imposed. This translates into a 21 percent increase in land use emissions due to US ethanol production. This estimate represents an upper bound, since irrigated area can be expanded over the medium run in many places around the world.

Suggested Citation

  • Taheripour, Farzad & Hertel, Thomas W. & Liu, Jing, 2011. "The Role of Irrigation in Determining the Global Land Use Impacts of Biofuels," 2011 Annual Meeting, July 24-26, 2011, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 103843, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea11:103843
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.103843
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/103843/files/Taheripour%20et%20al_2011.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.103843?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Catherine L. Kling & Raymond W. Arritt & Gray Calhoun & David A. Keiser, 2016. "Research Needs and Challenges in the FEW System: Coupling Economic Models with Agronomic, Hydrologic, and Bioenergy Models for Sustainable Food, Energy, and Water Systems," Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications 16-wp563, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University.
    2. Thomas Hertel & Jevgenijs Steinbuks & Uris Baldos, 2013. "Competition for land in the global bioeconomy," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 44(s1), pages 129-138, November.
    3. Liu, Jing & Taheripour, Farzad & Hertel, Thomas W., 2012. "Water Availability and Global Land Use Change," Conference papers 332228, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Land Economics/Use; Resource /Energy Economics and Policy;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:aaea11:103843. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.