Consumption-based accounts of land-use change related carbon emissions – CoBALUCE

国际贸易量迅速增长。这也适用于农业和林业产品，如食品、生物能源或木材。因此，消费产品的地方往往远离土地使用的地方。全球温室气体排放量的很大一部分来自土地利用和土地覆盖的变化。仅在几十年前，由土地利用变化引起的从大气中释放或吸收的碳是所有人为温室气体排放的主要部分，今天仍占约10%。减少温室气体排放可以通过改变生产（如燃料替代）或通过改变消费（如改变消费产品的数量和质量）来实现。虽然消费的“碳足迹”账户同时可用于工业过程产生的温室气体排放，但缺乏与土地使用变化有关的碳排放账户，CoBALUCE通过建立土地使用变化产生的碳排放综合账户，帮助缩小这一差距。目标是在全球30年时间序列中将所有与土地相关的碳排放（分别为碳固存）的80-90%分配给单个生物质（食品，饲料，材料生物能源）产品的消费。这是通过追踪任何一组国家之间在产品一级的双边贸易流动来实现的，所涉及的主要挑战涉及土地的碳排放（或吸收）也取决于土地使用历史（遗留效应），这大大妨碍了明确地将排放归于产品。为此，该项目在一次高级别专家会议上探讨了各种可能的分配规则的优缺点，并根据研究过程中建立的数据库实施了最有希望的备选方案，通过建立一个关于土地使用变化生物质产品排放量的可靠和全面的数据库，CoBALUCE帮助支持与陆地产品消费有关的国际气候政策。例如，该数据库提供了关于哪些国家从国际贸易中获益从而能够减轻国内环境压力的见解，另一方面，哪些国家的情况正好相反。

The volume of international trade is growing rapidly. This also holds for products from agriculture and forestry such as food, bioenergy or timber. As a consequence, the place where products are consumed is often far away from the place where land use occurs. A considerable fraction of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions results from land-use and land-cover change. Release or uptake of carbon from the atmosphere resulting from land-use change was a major fraction of all anthropogenic GHG emissions only a few decades ago, and still accounts for approximately 10% today.Reducing greenhouse gas emissions may be achieved through changes in production (e.g. fuel substitution) or through changes in consumption (e.g. changes in the amount and qualities of products that are consumed). While “carbon footprint” accounts of consumption have meanwhile become available for GHG emissions resulting from industrial processes, such accounts are lacking for the carbon emissions related to land-use change.CoBALUCE helps to close this gap by creating comprehensive accounts of carbon emissions from land-use change. The aim is allocate 80-90% of all land-related carbon emissions (respectively carbon sequestration) to the consumption of individual biomass (food, feed, material bioenergy) products for a global 30 year time series. This is achieved by tracing bilateral trade flows between any set of countries at the level of products.Major challenges which are addressed relate to the fact that carbon emissions (or uptake) of land also hinge on land-use history (legacy effects), which greatly hampers unequivocal attribution of emissions to products. Toward that end, the project explores strengths and weaknesses of different possible allocation rules in a high-level expert meeting and implements the most promising options, based on the databases created in the research process.By establishing a solid and comprehensive database on land-use change emissions of biomass products, CoBALUCE helps underpinning international climate policies related to the consumption of land-based products. For instance, the database provides insights into which nations disproportionally benefit from international trade and are therefore able to lower pressure on their domestic environment, and on the other hand, for which nations the opposite is the case.