Assessing drivers of land-use change and biodiversity loss in the United States

Li, Yijia

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125776 Copy

Description

Title

Assessing drivers of land-use change and biodiversity loss in the United States

Author(s)

Li, Yijia

Issue Date

2024-07-12

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Khanna, Madhu

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Khanna, Madhu

Committee Member(s)

• Paulson, Nicholas
• Hultgren, Andrew
• Miao, Ruiqing

Department of Study

Agr & Consumer Economics

Discipline

Agricultural & Applied Econ

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Land-use change
• biofuel policy
• Renewable Fuel Standard
• biodiversity
• pesticide use
• ethanol
• biodiesel

Abstract

With the advent of corn-based ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel policies, significant debates have arisen concerning the induced land-use changes and potential carbon emissions. My research develops a comprehensive empirical framework to evaluate not only the direct land-use change effects of biofuel refineries in their vicinity but also the indirect land-use changes due to increased crop prices that can occur in areas distant from the biorefineries. The first chapter quantifies the land-use change impact of corn-based ethanol, and the second chapter assesses the effects of soybean-based biodiesel. Despite modest increases in total cropland acreage in the United States over the past decades, bird biodiversity has been declining at alarming rates, coinciding with the exponential increase in neonicotinoid use. Therefore, the third chapter examines the causal effects of neonicotinoid use and compare them with the effects of other pesticide use on different bird species groups. The first chapter of my dissertation aims to examine the determinants of changes in corn acreage and aggregate crop acreage by simultaneously identifying the effects of establishment of ethanol plants serving as terminal markets for corn and the effects of changes in crop prices in the United States between 2003 and 2014. Our results show that corn acreage and total acreage are fairly inelastic with respect to both changes in ethanol capacity in the vicinity as well as changes in crop prices. Our estimates of acreage elasticity with respect to corn ethanol production are smaller than those obtained by previous studies that disregard the price effect on crop acreage. We find that, ceteris paribus, the increase in ethanol capacity alone led to a modest 3% increase in corn acreage and less than 1% increase in total crop acreage by 2012 when compared to 2008. The effect of corn price and aggregate crop price on acreage change over 2008-2012 was more than twice larger than that of effective ethanol production capacity over this period; but this price effect was largely reversed by the downturn in crop prices after 2012. This study shows that land-use change is not a static phenomenon and that it is important to examine how it evolves in response to various factors that may change over time. The second chapter aims to quantify the impact of soybean-oil-based biodiesel production and crop prices on cropland acreage in the United States, recognizing that biodiesel production influences land use through its effect on demand for soybean crushing. Since the rapid growth in soybean oil-based biodiesel production raises concerns about land-use change due to the increasing demand for soybeans, potentially leading to more significant land-use changes than those observed with corn-based ethanol. Using proprietary data on soybean crushing facilities and administrative data on biodiesel production, we develop a two-stage empirical model: the first stage estimates the relationship between biodiesel production and soybean crushing, while the second stage evaluates the land-use effects of crushing facilities. We use the two stages to infer the land-use change effects of biodiesel, and we find that the size of the impact is modest. The elasticities of soybean acreage and total cropland acreage with respect to biodiesel production are around 0.012 and 0.001, respectively. The land-use intensity of biodiesel is about 0.97 million acres of cropland expansion per billion gallons of biodiesel and is significantly larger than existing CGE model results on biodiesel. The direct land-use changes attributable to biodiesel production primarily occur in the heartland region of the United States. Neonicotinoid insecticides are being widely used and have raised concerns about negative impacts on non-target organisms. The third chapter aims to find the causal effects of pesticide use on bird biodiversity, as there has been no large scale, generalizable study on their impact on biodiversity of avian species in the United States (US). Here we show, using a rich dataset on breeding birds and pesticide use for the US, that the increase in neonicotinoid use led to statistically significant reduction in bird biodiversity, particularly for grassland and insectivorous birds with an average annual rate of reduction of 4% and 3%, respectively, between 2008 and 2014 relative to a counterfactual without neonicotinoid use. Corresponding rates are even higher, at 12% and 5%, respectively, when the dynamic effects of decline in bird population on future growth in population are considered. Effects of neonicotinoids on non-grassland and non-insectivorous birds are also statistically significant but smaller with an average annual rate of reduction of 2% per year over this period.

Graduation Semester

2024-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125776

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Yijia Li

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