Sub-national Land Use Change of Future International Demand for Agri-commodities in Argentina - In-depth Assessment of Linkages of GLOBIOM with TRASE

Mueller, C. (2021). Sub-national Land Use Change of Future International Demand for Agri-commodities in Argentina - In-depth Assessment of Linkages of GLOBIOM with TRASE. IIASA YSSP Report. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA

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Abstract

Tropical forests provide important ecosystem services through the storage of carbon in their biomass. Increasingly countries recognize this service as one of the solutions to meet the Paris climate goal. A driver of tropical deforestation is consumption of agri-commodities. Therefore to inform trade strategies, robust models to project future global land use change at high spatial resolution are needed that link drivers to impacts. Most of these models combine global-scale dynamic land use models with downscale approaches by finding relationships between drivers and observed subnational land use change patterns to project future land use change spatially-explicit. However explaining relationships between drivers and spatial land use change patterns was found to be more complex and challenging than initially thought, such as found for Argentina. Therefore this report aims to contribute to this body of research via developing understanding of how supply chain data and the trade-modelling approach of the Trase.earth programme, which is improving the transparency of existing supply chains at high-resolution, as well as local data, which are more accurate than global data, would change the spatial pattern of projected land use change from the GLOBIOM model. When compared to the default DownScale calibration, including TRASE- and local data lead to more concentration of the cropland expansion at the detriment of forest in few grid cells which were located in the northeast of the Chaco. We conclude that including spatially-explicit, local data can improve the understanding of where within a country land use change is likely to happen in future. This would allow to focus efforts to reduce detrimental environmental impacts to few geographies. However we describe how more research would be helpful to improve the robustness of these early findings.

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