Essays on land-use change, carbon sequestration and emissions in China

Graduation date: 2011China has experienced rapid economic growth in the last twenty years, accompanied by large-scale land conversion, severe environmental degradation, and rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Designing policies for sustainable development requires a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between economic growth, land-use change, carbon sequestration and emissions in China. This dissertation consists of three essays that address several relevant issues from an economic perspective.\ud The first essay presents an empirical analysis to identify the major drivers of land-use change in China for the period 1988-2000 by using highly-disaggregated, national-scale GIS land use data and a state-of-art econometric method. Results indicate that GDP growth and agricultural investment had relatively larger impacts on farmland conversion, while population growth and agricultural investment were more influential in grassland loss. Implications of the results for the design of farmland protection policies are discussed.\ud The second essay examines the relationship between land-use change and soil carbon sequestration in China. Results indicate that farmland and grassland loss, deforestation, and land idleness, driven by GDP growth, accelerated soil carbon runoff. Implementation of the green growth policy could generate up to 0.7-1.1 million Mg SOC and result in 22.2-37.4 million CNY welfare losses annually from 2001 to 2050. The marginal welfare loss is approximately ¥15.3/Mg (equivalent to $2.25/Mg) for sequestering about 1 million Mg SOC per year.\ud The third essay presents a new method to examine the sources of change in CO₂ emissions in China between 1991 and 2006. Results indicate that GDP scale effect accounted for the majority of emission increments. The emission index associated with capital was a dominant contributor to emission abatement. The effects of technical change in production and change in the GDP-composition by sector played positive roles in curtailing emissions