Public Policy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2803
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Item THE ROLES AND IMPLICATIONS OF AGRICULTURAL AND ENERGY RESOURCES TRADE IN A CLIMATE CHANGE-MITIGATING WORLD(2024) Yarlagadda, Brinda; Hultman, Nathan E.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Global dependence on agricultural and energy resources trade has grown significantly in the past several decades. In the coming decades, the roles and implications of international trade of various commodities will change, influenced by and important for achieving climate mitigation goals. As globalization increases, new energy technologies emerge, and new climate-oriented trade policies are enacted, there is a need to understand the resulting implications (opportunities and vulnerabilities) on exporters and importers. I present three essays that use the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) to evaluate future, inter-regional trade dynamics in a climate-mitigating world. Essay 1 focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), a key agricultural exporting region. I show that agricultural market integration (i.e., the reduction of trade barriers) and climate mitigation policies could increase agricultural production and trade opportunities for many LAC economies (particularly in southern South America). Total net export revenue across LAC could reach $110-$270 billion annually by 2050. However, these opportunities could also pose significant economic and environmental trade-offs, including emissions reduction challenges, potential loss of livestock production, increased consumer expenditures, and deforestation and water scarcity pressures. Essay 2 explores the role of liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade as a rapidly emerging technology compared to pipeline natural gas. I analyze how advances in LNG technology, limitations on trade, and climate mitigation policies could affect global and regional vulnerabilities in energy supply. Globally, new additions in LNG and pipeline export infrastructure, range from 330-1330 and 130-440 million tons per annum (MTPA), respectively, by 2050 across scenarios, with the lower end of this range achieved through a transition to a net-zero energy system and limited trade. The results also highlight diverging risks for different gas exporters. For example, Russia, which produces gas largely for pipeline exports, may face larger underutilization due to advances in LNG technology and geopolitical shifts than regions oriented towards domestic and LNG markets, such as the USA and Middle East. Essay 3 evaluates whether import-restrictions on deforestation linked oil crops (i.e., oil palm and soybean) can be effective in reducing deforestation and land use change (LUC) emissions as well as their broader economic implications. I find that current EU restrictions will likely have minimal impact. If extended beyond the EU, import restrictions could drive reductions in cumulative LUC emissions in key oil-crop exporting regions— up to 0.9% in Indonesia, 1.5% in the rest of Southeast Asia, 3.8% in Argentina and 6.7% in Brazil, relative to a scenario with no import restrictions. However, these key exporters could also face losses ranging $4.1-$61 billion in cumulative agricultural production revenue by 2050.Item RISKS TO FOOD AVAILABILITY AND ACCESS FROM CLIMATE POLICIES: AN INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT OF REGIONAL FOOD AVAILABILITY AND ACCESS WITH ALTERNATIVE CLIMATE MITIGATION STRATEGIES TO 2050(2016) Cui, Yiyun; Hultman, Nathan E.; Gilmore, Elisabeth A.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although mitigating GHG emissions is necessary to reduce the overall negative climate change impacts on crop yields and agricultural production, certain mitigation measures may generate unintended consequences to food availability and access due to land use competition and economic burden of mitigation. Prior studies have examined the co-impacts on food availability and global producer prices caused by alternative climate policies. More recent studies have looked at the reduction in total caloric intake driven by both changing income and changing food prices under one specific climate policy. However, due to inelastic calorie demand, consumers’ well-being are likely further reduced by increased food expenditures. Built upon existing literature, my dissertation explores how alternative climate policy designs might adversely affect both caloric intake and staple food budget share to 2050, by using the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) and a post-estimated metric of food availability and access (FAA). My dissertation first develop a set of new metrics and methods to explore new perspectives of food availability and access under new conditions. The FAA metric consists of two components, the fraction of GDP per capita spent on five categories of staple food and total caloric intake relative to a reference level. By testing the metric against alternate expectations of the future, it shows consistent results with previous studies that economic growth dominates the improvement of FAA. As we increase our ambition to achieve stringent climate targets, two policy conditions tend to have large impacts on FAA driven by competing land use and increasing food prices. Strict conservation policies leave the competition between bioenergy and agriculture production on existing commercial land, while pricing terrestrial carbon encourages large-scale afforestation. To avoid unintended outcomes to food availability and access for the poor, pricing land emissions in frontier forests has the advantage of selecting more productive land for agricultural activities compared to the full conservation approach, but the land carbon price should not be linked to the price of energy system emissions. These results are highly relevant to effective policy-making to reduce land use change emissions, such as the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).