Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
College/Unit
Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design
Department/Program/Center
Division of Resource Economics & Management
Abstract
Existing research provides estimates of the biophysical potential for increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) stock, however additional research is needed to enhance our understanding of the economic potential for agricultural soils to offset or help reduce CO2emissions. This study derives the marginal cost to increase SOC sequestration by combining SOC sequestration potential estimates developed using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) factors with an existing payment scheme that was designed to increase no-till (NT) adoption on U.S. cropland. The marginal costs of increasing SOC is a function of the amount of SOC that could be increased through NT and the expected cost to landowners of changing management to use NT.
Results
The variability in SOC sequestration rates due to different land-use, management histories, climate, and soils, combined with the 48 unique payment rates to adopt NT, yield over 5,000 unique marginal cost values for increasing SOC sequestration. Nearly 95 percent of the biophysical potential SOC sequestration increase on U.S. cropland (2802 Tg CO2 from 140.1 Tg CO2 year−1 for 20 years) could be captured for less than $100 Mg−1CO2. An estimated 64 to 93 percent of the biophysical potential could be captured for less than the low and high estimated costs to capture CO2 for geologic storage of $36.36 to $86.06 Mg−1 CO2, respectively.
Conclusions
Decreasing tillage intensity through adoption of no-till agriculture offers a cost-effective way to offset a portion of increasing global CO2 emissions. This research demonstrates that increasing SOC stocks through NT adoption can offset CO2 emissions at a lower cost than some other options for preventing CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
Digital Commons Citation
Sperow, Mark, "What might it cost to increase soil organic carbon using no-till on U.S. cropland?" (2020). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 2958.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/2958
Source Citation
Sperow, M. What might it cost to increase soil organic carbon using no-till on U.S. cropland?. Carbon Balance Manage 15, 26 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13021-020-00162-3
Comments
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
This article received support from the WVU Libraries' Open Access Author Fund.