In order to support the international negotiation process and for the development of good policies, the objective of the Integrated Sink Enhancement Assessment (INSEA) project was to develop an analytical tool to assess economic and environmental effects for enhancing carbon sinks on agricultural and forest lands. The approach was centered on spatially explicit databases that will allow the calculation of "cost-landscapes- taking on an engineering approach to integrated costs computation of additional sink enhancement measures and negative emission technologies. The various model structures were to be applied to detailed European data sets and less detailed global data sets assessing cost functions and long-term scenarios of sink enhancement measures. Concise policy conclusions from the modeling exercise aimed at supporting the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol commitments as well as post-Kyoto negotiations.
In the project a spatially explicit approach was advocated, which was motivated by the fact that land use, land-use changes and forestry (LULUCF)-activities are by their very nature spatial entities and aggregate non-spatial treatment could, according to our experience, lead to serious biases in the assessment. Furthermore, not only a simple and easily tractable static and deterministic approach for the aggregate cost calculations was applied, but also a more comprehensive, dynamic, and uncertainty (risk)-based assessment of individual sink enhancement measures in a multiple input/output environment aiming at an efficiency ranking of a set of promising measures was used. It was believed that such a multi-dimensional approach is necessary since ecosystems are more complicated and complex in their behaviour than technical systems and therefore robustness and consistency across a variety of decision rules should guarantee sustainable greenhouse gas management of land resources.
More information at the project website: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/FOR/INSEA/ (last visited 10.7.2018)