Special Issue "Agricultural Land Use, Economics and Climate Change"

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Bruce A. McCarl
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Agricultural Economics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA
Interests: climate change; climate change mitigation; water economics; policy; mathematical programming
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals
Dr. Chengcheng Fei
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Agricultural Economics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA
Interests: climate change economics; resource economics; mathematical programming
Dr. Jianhong Mu
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Texas A&M Transportation Research Institute, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA
Interests: climate change economics; land use economics; risk management

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Land use and climate change are complexly intertwined. Land provides food, fiber, timber, energy, ecosystem services, and biodiversity. Land productivity and processes are highly influenced by the climate, which is undergoing change due to factors including greenhouse gas fluxes. On the other hand, land is also involved with greenhouse gas fluxes, sequestering carbon, emitting gasses, and producing products that can replace commodities which are intensive in greenhouse gas emission. Thus, land is both influential in the drivers of climate change and is affected by the changing climate—a complex interrelationship. Land management can influence the interrelationship in two ways: it can reduce greenhouse gas net emissions, mitigating climate change; it also alters the practices or susceptibility of production systems to adapt to climate change, limiting the effects of climate change.

Research is needed in the domain of land use, land productivity, land-based greenhouse gas flux, climate change, and land management, because both future land use/productivity and the extent of climate change depend on land management and climate change interactions. While many aspects of the above issues are researchable topics and millions of pages have likely been written in this domain, we would like to narrow the topics into economics-related discussion, as the Guest Editors are economists.  

This Special Issue will focus on economic issues arising in the interaction of agricultural land use and climate change, including the following topics:

  • Vulnerability of agricultural land use systems and economic productivity to altered climate, including the effects of extreme events;
  • Economic consequences of adaptation to climate risk through land management and land use change;
  • Land-related actions that can economically reduce net greenhouse gas fluxes;
  • Sustainable agricultural land management to improve land productivity, economics, and risk exposure in addressing the total climate change issue.

Prof. Dr. Bruce A. McCarl
Dr. Chengcheng Fei
Dr. Jianhong Mu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • climate change
  • land management
  • land productivity
  • adaption
  • mitigation
  • economics and risk management

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

Article
Major United States Land Use as Influenced by an Altering Climate: A Spatial Econometric Approach
Land 2021, 10(5), 546; https://doi.org/10.3390/land10050546 - 20 May 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 576
Abstract
Climate and socioeconomic and policy factors are found to stimulate land use changes along with changes in greenhouse gas emissions and adaption behaviors. Most of the studies investigating land use changes in the U.S. have not considered potential spatial effects explicitly. We used [...] Read more.
Climate and socioeconomic and policy factors are found to stimulate land use changes along with changes in greenhouse gas emissions and adaption behaviors. Most of the studies investigating land use changes in the U.S. have not considered potential spatial effects explicitly. We used a two-step linearized multinomial logit to examine the impacts of various factors on conterminous U.S. land use changes including spatial lag coefficients. The estimation results show that the spatial dependences have existed for cropland, pastureland, and grasslands with a negative dependence on forests but weakened in most of the land uses except for croplands. Temperature and precipitation were found to have nonlinear impacts on the land use shares in the succeeding years by exerting opposite effects on crop versus pasture/grass shares. We also predicted land use changes under different climate change scenarios. The simulation results imply that the southern regions of the U.S. would lose cropland shares with further severity under the business-as-usual climate scenarios, while the land use shares for pasture/grass and forest would increase in those regions. As land use plays an important role in the climate system and vice versa, the results from this study may help policymakers tackle climate-driven land use changes and farmers adapt to climate change. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Agricultural Land Use, Economics and Climate Change)
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