Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

An Econometric Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on Forest Land Value and Broad Land-use Change

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/kp78gn36h

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  • Climate change affects the choice of land-use not only through its direct effect on the productive potential of land, but also through human actions that alter the landscape. In this dissertation, I estimate current climate's effect on the economic net returns to alternative land-use systems in the United States. Then I model the conversion between these alternative uses to analyze how future climate change may alter future landscapes. My research contributes to the general knowledge of natural resource and environmental economics by i) developing the first national scale application of the Ricardian method to the economic return to forestry, ii) conducting the first study to model broad land-use change as an explicit function of climate variables for the conterminous U.S., and iii) constructing a novel and flexible framework for analyzing alternative future climate and demographic scenarios and their effect on land-use change. I model climate's impact on the economic net returns to four major U.S. land-use systems: crop, pasture, forest, and urban. Each climate model is specified separately to capture the distinct ways that climate drives land rents. The climate models are used to predict the impact of climate change on the profitability of the alternative land-uses. Predicted climate change impacts on land rent are the inputs to a discrete choice logit model, facilitating estimation of transition probabilities for land starting in crop, pasture, and forest. A functional relationship is established between climate and the probability of land-use change. The full model is used to examine the impact of climate change on the southeastern U.S. landscape. The national analysis of forest rents indicates significant increases to forest profitability across most of the U.S. under climate change projections to 2050. However, there is limited evidence that higher forest rents in the southeast will induce large shifts in the forest land area. Although climate change increases the amount of forest land, the magnitude of impact is small relative to non-climatic drivers of land-use change. The models constructed here have the potential to test numerous climate change scenarios with significant implications for land-use policy.
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  • United States Forest Service
  • National Institute of Food and Agriculture
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