Assessing the Efficiency of Changes in Land Use for Mitigating Climate Change (Nature, December 2018)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z

When land shifts from producing corn to soybeans to kumquats, or from cropland to grazing land or bioenergy, or back to forest, does that help or hurt the world’s potential to mitigate climate change? This paper finds that typical methods used by policymakers and researchers to answer this question have not properly focused on the need to increase the efficiency of land to meet growing demands for both food and carbon storage. This limitation is particularly important because climate strategies require storing more carbon in forests and other native vegetation even as the world must produce 50 percent or more additional food per year. The paper provides a new method, called the Carbon Benefits Index, for making this evaluation, and includes a new spreadsheet tool that people can use to evaluate the climate conseuqneces of different changes in land use or production methods for specific hectares or parcels of land.  The World Resources Institute will keep that tool and its updates and will be avaialble here. For a more thorough explanation of the new paper and its significance, please read this explanation.