Deforestation is one of the major issues facing the global agriculture production system, with as much as 8% of global CO₂ emissions attributable to land-use change. A well-known example is deforestation to cultivate crops such as soybean and oil palm. Many studies have focused on this issue and have provided global or country-specific estimations of CO₂ emissions due to land-use change based on available statistics or satellite imagery.

A big challenge for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) researchers is translating this impact of land-use change to specific crops from specific countries while little primary data is available. We specifically designed our LUC Impact Tool to address this challenge.

The LUC Impact tool

We developed the Land Use Change Impact tool according to the PAS2050-1 guidelines. It draws on the most recent FAO country-level data on cropland, forest, and grassland expansion and decline. Furthermore, it includes new estimations of biomass carbon stock in forests from the Forest Resource Assessment 2020. Finally, soil carbon stock factors align with the IPCC's National Greenhouse Gas Inventories guidelines, last updated in 2019.

LUC Impact is an Excel-based tool that provides a predefined way of calculating GHG emissions from LUC. This tool offers insight into the land transformation and associated emissions related to the cultivation of a specific country and crop combination. The LUC Impact tool can define LUC when the previous land use is known or unknown. If the country of cultivation is also unknown, the tool can calculate the average GHG emissions connected to LUC for a selected crop. This way, the tool has three functionalities based on the amount of information available to the user. The tool also lets users select specific land management practices that influence soil organic carbon content, such as tillage level and organic input level, to represent the specific cultivation system's carbon stock accurately.