Intensification and production reallocation: Attributing land-use changes to their underlying drivers

Debates on bioenergy production emphasized the complex nature of land-use changes which put into play responses from the demand and supply-side based on price signals and biophysical potentials. Every change in agricultural production leads to mechanisms of intensification, production reallocation and changes in demand which usually refer to as indirect land-use changes (ILUC). These indirect effects have been estimated by many studies, however their mechanic has never been made completely explicit. Thus, to improve our understanding of land-use dynamic, the objective of this paper is to attribute as precisely as possible land-use changes to their underlying drivers. The following processes are considered: changes in yield due to (i) input use and to (ii) expansion on marginal lands, and changes of production allocation (iii) across countries and (iv) across sectors (between crop and livestock). This study provides first an analytic decomposition of land-use changes from a production shock that makes it possible to distinguish between land-use changes directly resulting from the production shock and those resulting from price-induced effects. A numerical analysis is then conducted using the global model of land-use NLU in the case of a biofuel scenario from rapeseed in France