UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
4 results
Search Results
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 EXPLORING RECENT DIRECTIONS IN INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT MODELING RESEARCH: IMPLICATIONS FOR SCENARIO ANALYSES OF CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND IMPACTS USING THE GCAM MODEL(2021) Santos da Silva, Silvia Regina; Miralles-Wilhelm, Fernando R.; Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are essential analytical tools in climate change science. There is wide recognition of the need of credible IAM scenarios for guidance on developing climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. This dissertation employs the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM), a state-of-the-art IAM, in three studies that develop meaningful scenario analyses of climate change mitigation and impacts to address key gaps in the contemporary IAM research. The first study deals with the challenge of reconciling mitigation strategies consistent with the Paris Agreement climate goals with constraints on energy-water-land (EWL) resources. The study highlights the fact that mitigation strategies can have unintended repercussions for the EWL sectors, which can undermine their overall effectiveness. In Latin American countries used as case studies, increased water demands for crop and biomass irrigation and for electricity generation stand out as potential trade-offs resulting from climate mitigation policies. The second study demonstrates that scenarios that explore the consequences of climate change impacts on renewable energy for the electric power sector need to adopt a comprehensive modeling approach that accounts for climate change impacts in all renewables. Using such an approach, the findings from this study show that climate impacts on renewables can result in additional capital investment requirements in Latin America. Conversely, accounting for climate impacts only on hydropower – a primary focus of previous studies – can significantly underestimate investment estimates, particularly in scenarios with high intermittent renewable deployment. The last study demonstrates that GCAM projections of solar photovoltaics and wind onshore electricity generation can be largely affected by methodological uncertainties in the computation of global renewable energy potentials – used to produce resource cost-supply curves that are key input assumptions to IAMs. Consequently, the role of these renewables in the modeled long-term scenarios can be under- or overestimated with potential implications for decision-making on energy planning, climate change mitigation and on the adaptation efforts to climate impacts on these renewables. The three studies encompass questions that have received little or no attention by the IAM community, and contribute with relevant approaches and insights that offer improvements relative to prior analyses. Importantly, these results help to enhance the value of GCAM scenarios to decision-making and identify research opportunities that might help improve GCAM as well as other IAM projections.Item Context and future potential for strategic afforestation and reforestation to meet state climate mitigation goals(2021) Lamb, Rachel Loraine; Hurtt, George C; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The development of greenhouse gas reduction plans, climate initiatives, and other international efforts, such as the Bonn Challenge, has driven demand for improved carbon accounting practices in the land-use sector. Recent projects advanced by the NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) and the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Mission provide critical information on present and future forest carbon stocks through high-resolution remote sensing and ecosystem modeling technologies. A key remaining geospatial and computational challenge is to identify and map strategic land areas for reforestation, which move decision-makers from considering wall-to-wall carbon sequestration potentials to priority implementation. This research seeks to address this challenge at the U.S. state scale by situating and demonstrating the unique capability of high-resolution NASA CMS forest carbon products to inform strategic reforestation in support of multiple policy goals. This work began with a review of the broader science and policy context for integrating forest carbon estimates into state climate mitigation planning across eleven states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) domain (USA). Next, two specific and linked applications of CMS products were advanced in Maryland (USA) in support of state reforestation goals. First, a forest carbon rental model was developed and applied to determine whether and where potential revenues from reforestation would outcompete existing cropland profit at the hectare scale. Second, two reforestation scenarios that jointly maximized remaining carbon sequestration potential and unprotected biodiversity conservation areas were mapped and evaluated under several socio-economic factors. These results show that while most states in the region do not yet including forest carbon estimates within their climate mitigation planning, high-resolution CMS forest carbon products can be combined with socio-economic data to advance strategic reforestation in support of climate mitigation, as well as landowner livelihoods and expanded biodiversity protection. This research provides a framework for other states interested in strategic climate mitigation planning with high-resolution forest carbon products. Furthermore, the results directly advance carbon monitoring science applications to ecosystem management, environmental policy, and land-use planning, and address relevant issues in public and private sector decision-making, such as uncertainty, valuation, implications, costs, and benefits.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).