LANDMARC aims to better understand the potential and impacts of land-use-based mitigation technologies and practices (LMTs). LMTs seek to avoid and reduce the release of greenhouse gases (GHG) and/or capture GHG from the atmosphere. The project also seeks to understand their associated societal, economic, and environmental co-benefits.
LANDMARC deploys interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, through co-creation with stakeholders, made up of three pillars addressing our main objectives:
1. Identify feasibility of LMTs: carried out with extensive stakeholder engagement.
2. Assess carbon sequestration potential, the ability to capture GHG from the atmosphere through earth observations (EO) techniques.
3. Quantify LMT potential: assesses the potential and barriers for scaling up technologies and practices from local to global levels, through simulation modeling.
1. Feasibility of LMT applications
Stakeholder engagement is mainly driven by social sciences, but also support EO and simulation modeling work, by collecting complementary data/information (EO, land-use, economic, etc. data) - and through the co-development of realistic scenarios for scaling up LMT portfolios. This work is complemented by our communication and dissemination work.
2. Carbon sequestration potential
The EO pillar relies heavily on earth systems monitoring, above-ground remote sensing (satellite and drones), and below ground soil/vegetation sciences (soil sampling), to better map and monitor the carbon cycle in soils and vegetation.
3. Quantification
Simulation modeling will enable us to better understand the range of impacts through the use- and coupling of biogeochemical models, land use cumulative effects models, climate models, and macro-economic models. These are associated with scaling up LMT portfolios at different levels of aggregation (i.e. local to continental/global).
LANDMARC’s work has the potential to bring important social and policy changes by linking stakeholders’ existing adaptation (e.g. forest management), or other economic activities (farming/forestry), to mitigation efforts. LMTS are not typically considered as mitigation practices or as contributors to net carbon sinks. Thus, we help stakeholders to assess the carbon mitigation and net sink potential through a combination of earth observation and modeling tools and provide new business models to capture both the economic and social co-benefits of LMTs.
We then present policy mixes to promote the implementation and/or scaling up of LMTs. We also assess the risks, opportunities, and sometimes difficult trade-offs related to the LMTs. Our insights will support the policy-making processes in determining the types of LMTs that have short, medium, and longer-term mitigation impacts, and the policies that need to be phased in to support them.
