PNNL

Leakage occurs whenever actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in one part of the world unleash countervailing forces elsewhere in the world so that reductions in global emissions are less than emissions mitigation in the mitigating region. While many researchers have examined the concept of industrial leakage, land-use policies can also result in leakage. We show that land-use leakage is potentially as large as or larger than industrial leakage. We identify two potential land-use leakage drivers, land-use policies and bioenergy. We distinguish between these two pathways and run numerical experiments for each. We also show that the land-use policy environment exerts a powerful influence on leakage and that under some policy designs leakage can be negative. International “offsets” are a potential mechanism to communicate emissions mitigation beyond the borders of emissions mitigating regions, but in a stabilization regime designed to limit radiative forcing to 3.7 2/m2, this also implies greater emissions mitigation commitments on the part of mitigating regions.