At the Co-ordination Meeting of OPEC Negotiators in the run-up to COP-14/CMP4, to be held at OPEC HQ, Vienna on 12 November 2008, Mahendra Shah will make a presentation on “Deforestation, Forest Degradation and Agriculture: Knowledge, Policy, Funding and International Climate Change Negotiations”.

The Land Use Change and Agriculture Program of IIASA is a partner in the IN-STREAM project, launched in October 2008. The project will run for three years.

Limited knowledge about the probabilities and consequences of extreme climate change scenarios is no reason for inaction – concludes LUC’s Ferenc Toth one of the contributors to a special issue of Climatic Change. Papers assess probabilities and analyze policy responses related to the North Atlantic Meridional Overturning and the West-Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID) has commissioned the Land Use Change and Agriculture Program to carry out a study entitled "Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security: Implications of an Accelerated Expansion of Biofuels Production". First results will be reported early 2009.

The urgent need for improved soil information worldwide prompted the Land Use Change and Agriculture Program of IIASA (LUC) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to develop a new comprehensive “Harmonized World Soil Database” (HWSD) (see also the FAO website). Vast volumes of recently collected regional and national updates of soil information were used for this state-of-the-art database.

Report on scenario simulations until 2030 with the CHINAGRO welfare model covering national, regional and county levels. At the onset of the CATSEI project (China Agricultural Transition: Social and Environmental Impacts) a report has been published jointly by the Land Use Change and Agriculture Program of IIASA, Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Beijing, China, Center for World Food Studies, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK. The report China’s agricultural prospects and challenges (pdf) presents scenario simulations until 2030 with the Chinagro welfare model at national, regional and county levels in China.

The REFUEL project, an endeavor commissioned by the EU’s Intelligent Energy Europe Program me, presented its Biofuels Road Map at a policy maker workshop and a press conference in Brussels on March 14. Sylvia Prieler participated in both events on behalf of the Land Use Change and Agriculture Program. Presentation. Press release.
     The main conclusion of REFUEL is that the EU biofuels target for 2020 can be met without major agricultural land use changes or environmental consequences. However, only advanced, second generation biofuels are likely to contribute substantially to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing energy security. Introducing such advanced biofuels will require supportive measures at several policy levels.
     The Land Use Change and Agricultural Program contributed significantly to the study with (i) a Pan-European assessment of bio-physical production potentials of all main biofuel feedstocks and (ii) the development and application of alternative scenarios quantifying land available for domestic biofuel feedstock production without compromising food/feed production or affecting nature conservation.

A new FAO/IIASA-LUC report entitled Mapping biophysical factors that influence agricultural production and rural vulnerability (pdf) is part of a series of reports explaining how spatial analysis techniques can be used to investigate poverty and environment links worldwide. It combines rural population distribution data from the global rural population database for the year 2000 (FAO, 2005) with methods and results of the Global agro-ecological assessment for agriculture in the 21st Century (Fischer et al., 2002) in order to estimate the distribution of the world’s rural population by agricultural suitability class, land use category and type of farming system. Details and download.

LUC Archives 2009, 2008, 2007