Deforestation is one of the biggest issues facing the global agriculture production system and a big contributor to climate change worldwide. A well-known example is the clearance of forests to cultivate crops, such as soybean and oil palm. Globally, forest coverage continues to decrease by an astonishing average of 4.7 million hectares every year (FAO, 2020).

Within Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies it is often a requirement to report the emissions emerging from Land Use Change (LUC) separately. This can become rather complex because data availability is limited. Many studies provide global or country-specific estimations based on statistics or satellite imagery. However, for LCA researchers it can be challenging to translate this impact into specific crops from specific countries due to a lack of primary data.

We specifically designed our LUC Impact products to address this challenge and provide solutions. 

LUC Impact Tool 

Web-based tool to calculate GHG emissions from LUC

The Land Use Change Impact Tool is a web-based tool that provides a predefined way of calculating Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from LUC. It offers insight into land transformation and associated emissions related to specific country-crop combinations across different scenarios. The tool also lets you select specific land management practices that influence soil organic carbon content, such as tillage level and organic input level, to represent the specific cultivation system’s carbon stock more accurately. 

The LUC Impact Tool offers 3 basic functionalities to calculate direct land use change, based on your data availability:

• Country & Land Use known: If the previous land use is known, for example through analysis of satellite images, this functionality can be used to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions related to the actual conversion.
• Country known & Land Use unknown: This functionality calculates land conversions and related emissions based on statistics (also called statistical LUC or sLUC) and uses the latest data from FAO, up to and including 2020. Emissions, insights in intermediate results and visual representations of the underlying data are available for 9,000+ crop-country combinations.
• Country & Land Use unknown: If the sourcing country of the crop is unknown, this function provides a global production-based weighted average LUC emissions.

LUC methodologies: linear and equal amortization   

The tool builds upon the latest LUC standards, such as the SBTi Forest Land and Agriculture (FLAG) guidelines. The SBTi FLAG guidelines require linear discounting, which assigns more emissions to the years directly after the LUC event. As such, we have updated the tool to offer the possibility to perform LUC calculations with both linear and equal discounting.

Find more information in the LUC Impact Tool Methodology Report. 

Innovative and exclusive feature:
'Carbon Opportunity Cost'

One of the innovative features of the LUC Impact Tool is ‘Carbon Opportunity Cost’ (COC). It gives you insights in the missed potential carbon stocks on agricultural land. Most of the existing LUC methods, which are recommended in LCA standards, focus on recent conversions of land. However, not only just recently converted land, but all land occupation comes at a carbon cost. The COC method helps to determine the carbon stock capacity of land in its natural state and assess the gap between this potential stock and the current carbon stock.

The carbon opportunity cost in the LUC Impact Tool is a simplified version of the method proposed by Searchinger (et al., 2018), to account for the difference between the carbon stock (in soil and vegetation) potential natural situation (PNV) [1] , compared to the current use as agricultural land. With these insights we provide another perspective on lost carbon stocks related to land use, and thus complement the LUC emissions from other methods.

LUC Impact Dataset

Excel dataset of LUC GHG emissions

The LUC Impact dataset provides LUC greenhouse emissions for 9,000+ crop-country combinations, including emission results calculated using both linear and equal amortization in compliance with footprinting standards such as PAS2050-1 and SBTi FLAG.

The dataset comes as an Excel file and gives the results of the three calculation methods from the ‘country known, land use unknown’ functionality of the tool. The weighted average takes into account relative differences in crop expansion at the expense of forest, grassland, annual/perennial. The normal average is a simple average of these options. All results are scaled to the relative amount of expansion of the crop. The worst case of the average and weighted average is used in the PAS2050-1 protocol. 

It is available for a licensing fee of €580 (excl. VAT).

If you wish to integrate the data into your commercial tool, please contact us to request a special license.

CASE STUDY

LCA database for plant-based ingredients for Pulse Canada

With the help of the LUC Impact Tool, Blonk has developed a new LCA database for plant-based ingredients for Pulse Canada, the Industry Association for Canadian pulse growers and exporters. The database combines country-specific datasets of common pulses, such as soybean and peas, with regionalized datasets. We used the recently updated LUC Impact Tool to include the CO₂ emissions equivalent related to land-use change. The tool enabled us to calculate the emissions and removal of greenhouse gases caused by land-use conversion, specifically for growing soybeans and peas in particular geographical areas. In addition, it was possible to account for the influence of different tillage practices on carbon stocks and the resulting CO₂ emissions equivalent.

[1] Potential natural vegetation is a theoretic representation of the vegetation following human abandonment, simulated under current climate conditions.

[2] Blonk only calculates the direct effect of LUC. Indirect LUC (iLUC) is not taken into account, which refers to “land use changes elsewhere, resulting from changes in demand to a specific crop from a specific country.” For instance:  more carbon emissions due to land use changes induced by the expansion of agricultural lands for biofuels.