LUC4C

LUC4C will advance our fundamental knowledge of the climate change – land use change interactions, and develop a framework for the synthesis of complex earth system science into guidelines that are of practical use for policy and societal stakeholders.

Our aim is to identify the beneficial and detrimental aspects of alternative land use options. To do so, we work on improving and evaluating a suite of modelling approaches at different levels of integration and complexity.

In particular, LUC4C aims to:

1. Enhance our ability to understand the societal and environmental drivers of land use and land cover change (LUC) relevant to climate change;
2. Assess regional and global effects of different mitigation policies and adaptation measures within alternative socio-economic contexts;
3. Quantify how the LUC-climate change interplay affects regional vs. global, and biophysical vs. biogeochemical ecosystem-atmosphere exchange, and how the relative magnitude of these interactions varies through time;
4. Advance our ability to represent LUC in climate models;
5. Assess LUC-climate effects on multiple land ecosystem services and analyse these in relation to other societal needs that provide either a synergy or trade-off to climate mitigation and adaptation.

from the results as published in the final report at https://cordis.europa.eu/docs/results/603/603542/final1-luc4c-final-report-v2.pdf the following summary is derived:

land-based mitigation is not a ‘silver bullet’ to avoid climate change, but alongside drastic reductions in fossil fuel emissions, it can contribute to delivering the ‘balance of sources and sinks’ in the Paris Agreement. Land-based mitigation is currently the only way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a scale that is potentially relevant to climate mitigation. The land sector will not be emissions-free, as emissions are necessarily associated with food production. Moreover, there is a real danger that land-based mitigation will compete with food production, the provision of other ecosystem services, and protection of biodiversity. Further analysis is required to understand fully the many tradeoffs beyond climate mitigation that arise from land management and to identify policy options that support co-benefits. Land-based mitigation could potentially enable the land sector as a whole to approach a balance of sources and sinks, and, if barriers are overcome and sustainability ensured, it could further offset some of the more unavoidable emissions from fossil fuels.