New Estimates of Soil and Biomass Carbon Stocks for Global Economic Models

We synthesized a range of geographically-explicit forest, grassland and cropland biomass and soil carbon input data sources and used geographic information systems (GIS) software to calculate new estimates of soil and biomass carbon stocks for use with global economic models, particularly for the Global Trade and Analysis Project (GTAP). Our results quantify the average amount of carbon stored in soil and biomass in each of the 246 countries, stratified by agro-ecological zones (available in the accompanying spreadsheet). We also provide the data aggregated to the 134 regions defined for the GTAP 8.1 database both in spreadsheet form and in GTAP’s native binary file format. Finally, we provide an add-on to FlexAgg2 program to further aggregate the 134 regions as desired. Our analysis makes substantial refinements to the estimates of carbon stocks used for modeling carbon emissions from indirect land use change. The spatial detail of our analysis is a major advantage over previous databases because it provides estimates tailored to the regions of interest and better accounts for the variation of carbon stocks across the landscape, and between wetland and non-wetland regions.