Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

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Understanding Human Decision Making as a Driver for Carbon Sequestration on Land

Elisabeth Failey (1) and Lisa Dilling (2)

Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (1), CIRES (2), University of Colorado at Boulder (3)

As society begins to grapple with reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in order to address climate change, policy discussions have emerged on the role of land use as a means to sequester carbon. Land use is already a key player in the global carbon budget through manipulations of vegetation and soils for agriculture and forestry. At the heart of land use is human decision making. The land use pattern and its attendant carbon impacts are a manifestation of a complex set of policy, economic, and cultural drivers that are channeled and expressed through individuals making decisions about land use. In order to understand the current pattern of carbon fluxes on managed land, and any future potential for land use to play a greater role in sequestering carbon, it is essential to understand the drivers of land use decision making at different scales, and their intersection with new imperatives and opportunities coming from climate mitigation goals. To this end, we have conducted a case study on land use decision making in the U.S. state of Colorado, a western state with significant portions of land managed by U.S. Federal governmental agencies in addition to privately-owned agricultural, grazing and forested lands. Our main goal was to put together a first-order look at the types of decision makers involved in managing land, what influences their decisions, and how the potential for storage of additional carbon on land might vary according to ownership category and land vegetation type. Our study has three significant components: 1. examining ownership patterns; 2. calculating the flux and carbon storage by land ownership category; and 3. illuminating the influences on land use decisions at different scales. In this paper, we will report the preliminary results of GIS work examining carbon fluxes by ownership category and the potential for additional storage of carbon based on policy and economic incentives.