GTAP Resources: Resource Display
| GTAP Resource #7762 |
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"Evaluating improved Soil Organic Carbon stocks for Adjusted Land-Use Emission Factors" Authors: Benavidez-Brouk, Lauren, Farzad Taheripour and Uris Lantz Baldos Abstract Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a key determinant of land-use change emissions and agricultural mitigation potential, yet policy analysis often relies on a single SOC dataset without assessing how alternative sources affect results. This study evaluates how differences across major global SOC databases translate into variation in policy-relevant estimates. We compared four widely used products: Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD), WISE30sec, SoilGrids, and FAO’s Global Soil Organic Carbon Map (GSOCmap), and harmonized them to a common spatial resolution and land-cover product. For each grid cell, we calculate the mean, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation across the four SOC estimates to measure database disagreement. We also assess methodological differences in SOC calculation, including corrections for soil coarseness, and translate SOC baselines into carbon stock changes using IPCC Tier-1 stock-change factors for key land-use and management transitions. Results show limited disagreement in arid, low-SOC regions, but much larger variation in humid temperate and tropical agricultural zones and in high-latitude forest regions. Methodological corrections can alter estimated SOC stocks by about 15%. In the U.S. cropland, differences in SOC baselines imply forest-to-cropland soil emission factors ranging from roughly 66 to 104 tCO2 per hectare. These findings show that SOC map choice can materially affect land-use emissions estimates and should be treated as a structural modeling assumption rather than a background dataset. |
| Resource Details () | GTAP Keywords | ||||||||||||||||
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- Climate change policy - Land use - Renewable energy - Other data bases and data issues - Agricultural policies |
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Public Access  GTAP Resource 7762 (236.7 KB) Replicated: 0 time(s)Restricted Access No documents have been attached. Special Instructions No instructions have been specified. |
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Last Modified: 4/15/2026 11:27:11 AM
