US-REGEN Documentation

Resource and Technology Assumptions / Carbon Management

Natural Climate Solutions

Natural climate solutions include a range of "low-tech" activities such as afforestation, improved soil management on crop lands, and enhanced weathering of minerals that lead to the passive removal of carbon from atmosphere and can act as negative emissions flows. These options are relatively limited in scale, and are often accompanied by challenges around permanence, additionality, monitoring and enforcement. Nonetheless, they can be an important component of an economy-wide decarbonization strategy. In US-REGEN natural climate solutions are included based on an assumed supply curve derived from the estimates in Fargione et al (2018)[1]. To reflect the institutional challenges, we assume both higher cost and more limited scale than the total potential estimated in that study. The default specification assumes that a maximum negative flow of 300 MtCO2 can be achieved up to a marginal cost of $400/tCO2.

  1. Fargione, J. et al (2018). Natural Climate Solutions for the United States, Science Advances 4:11. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat1869. Available: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aat1869open in new window. Accessed Nov 19, 2021. ↩︎