Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** since the united states has…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** since the united states has RE-joined the paris agreement on climate change with ambitious goals for mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the development of carbon credit markets in the U.S. Has gained momentum, the potential contribution of agriculture to reaching the climate goals has attracted much attention. The conservation reserve program (CRP) in the U.S., one of the world's largest voluntary conservation programs with 20.7 million acres of land enrolled as of may 2021, is expected to enhance the ability of U.S. Agriculture to mitigate climate change. This project proposes to examine ways to enhance the impact of CRP on climate change mitigation by synergizing the CRP and potential carbon credit payments for CO2 sequestration. Specifically, the proposed project will first quantify changes in GHG emissions and carbon sequestration when cropland is enrolled in the CRP at a 10KM-by-10KM scale in the contiguous united states based on field measurement and ecological modeling. Second, the proposed project will conduct a farmer survey that investigates farmers' willingness to enroll or RE-enroll their land into the CRP under various program incentive schemes. Lastly, based on the ecological modeling and the landowner survey, the proposed project will investigate the efficacy of different CRP enrollment mechanism designs in enhancing the CRP's carbon benefits. This proposed project will also generate a comprehensive database of carbon benefits of CRP land at a 10KM-by-10KM resolution of the contiguous US and of landowners' willingness to enroll their land into the CRP. This research will provide both a conceptual and simulation modeling framework and a rich database as a publicly available resource to the field of land conservation and GHG mitigation.