The role of irrigation in determining the global land use impacts of biofuels
F. Taheripour, T. W. Hertel, and J. Liu
Energy, Sustainability and Society (2013)
Recent studies have evaluated the land use consequences of biofuel programs and the associated carbon fluxes. However, all of these studies have effectively ignored the distinction between rainfed and irrigated lands and neglected the facts that irrigated croplands typically have much higher yields than their rainfed counterparts in the same region and that expansion in irrigated crops are limited in some regions due to water scarcity and irrigation constraint. This paper shows that these omissions introduce systematic biases in the measurement of biofuel-induced land use change emissions.