LUC Impact Tool

Core Features

The LUC Impact tool calculates direct land-use change rather than indirect LUC (iLUC). Its methodology draws on FAO statistics and IPCC carbon-stock data and supports several approaches depending on how much users know about a crop and its production location.

• Known Land-Use Calculations: Where the country and previous land use are known, users can calculate emissions from the actual conversion using parameters including crop, climate, soil, tillage, organic-matter inputs and previous vegetation.

• Statistical LUC: When the country is known but previous land use is not, the tool uses historical FAO statistics for changes in forest, grassland and cropland and the expansion of the selected crop to estimate land conversion and associated emissions.

• Unknown-Country Estimates: If only the crop is known, LUC Impact can calculate a global production-weighted estimate across relevant producing countries.

• Scenario Analysis: Users can vary assessment years, amortization periods and methods, tillage, organic-matter inputs, carbon-stock sources and other parameters to investigate how assumptions affect results.

• Standards-Based Amortization: Equal amortization options support approaches associated with PAS 2050 and the GHG Protocol, while linear amortization supports SBTi FLAG and GHG Protocol methodologies

Closing Insights

The LUC Impact Tool is particularly useful where agricultural carbon footprints must include land-use change but detailed historical information is unavailable. A company may know the crop and sourcing country without knowing what occupied the land before cultivation. The tool can estimate the resulting emissions statistically; where previous land use is known, it can instead calculate the impact of the actual conversion.

A distinctive capability is Carbon Opportunity Cost (COC). Conventional LUC methods generally focus on emissions caused by relatively recent land conversion. COC takes a different perspective by considering the carbon that agricultural land could potentially store under natural vegetation and comparing this with its current carbon stock. It therefore highlights a carbon consequence of continued agricultural land occupation that conventional LUC calculations may not capture.

The tool also feeds into established agricultural LCA work. Its results are incorporated into Agri-footprint and have provided LUC inputs for the GFLI database. Blonk used the tool when developing an LCA database for Pulse Canada, calculating land-conversion emissions for crops including soybeans and peas in specific production regions.

Unlike the related LUC Impact Dataset, which supplies pre-calculated crop-country factors, the web-based tool allows users to adjust parameters and investigate different scenarios. Blonk offers several licence options, with pricing available on request.