Rethinking dLUC carbon accounting: bridging crop-specific deforestation peaks and land emissions assessment period

Main Presenter:    Miguel Montero Alonso 

Co-Authors:   Miguel Brandão     Jorge Blanco Cejas      Jovita Moreno Vozmediano                                    

Land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities contribute roughly 5 Gt CO2-equivalent per year, about 15% of total anthropogenic emissions, yet current carbon footprint standards such as PAS 2050 rely on a fixed 20-year amortization period that can leave emissions from earlier land conversions unassigned to any product as “orphan emissions.” Building on the explicit inclusion of planetary boundaries in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, this study evaluates whether planetary boundary transgression can serve as an alternative temporal reference for direct land use change (dLUC) carbon footprint accounting. Two methods for estimating the dLUC footprint of three crops grown in Brazil and Indonesia are compared: the standard PAS 2050 approach and a statistical land use change (sLUC) method based on land transitions, adapted from MapBiomas data. Both methods draw on open-source datasets (FAO, MapBiomas, IPCC Guidelines) and are benchmarked against spatially explicit estimates from recent literature, complemented by an uncertainty analysis of carbon stock and crop yield. Results indicate that PAS 2050 lacks sufficient precision for dLUC accounting and is prone to distortion when national cropland trends diverge from those of a specific crop, and that it fails to capture historical deforestation peaks, such as 1990–1995 in Brazil. The sLUC-based method aligns more closely with independent estimates and is less affected by such distortions. While planetary boundary transgression offers a scientifically grounded temporal reference, it does not always best capture crop-specific deforestation peaks; the most effective temporal criterion is the one most closely tied to the crop’s own expansion pattern. We therefore recommend the sLUC-based land-transition method as a more robust alternative to PAS 2050, capable of revealing orphan emissions overlooked by widely used carbon footprint standards (PAS 2050, PEF, GHG Protocol) and offering a practical tool for tracing the most carbon-intensive segments of agricultural supply chains.

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