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Tuesday, July 29, 2025
8:30 am - 9:30 am
Sheraton Denver Downtown
Plaza Court ABC
"Economics of Land-Based Carbon Mitigation"
Agricultural land holds tremendous potential as a medium for carbon mitigation through a wide-range of strategies, including sequestering carbon in the soil, with climate-smart practices, and displacing fossil fuels, through feedstocks for a bioeconomy and solar farming. The land use changes required for carbon mitigation are often hampered by mixed economic incentives, limited and shifting policy signals, public opposition to the trade-offs they entail, and varied scientific evidence on their unintended economic or environmental impacts.
This presentation will examine the economic incentives and barriers to implementing land-based carbon mitigation strategies and the drivers of effectiveness. It will discuss the synergies and conflicts among food production, carbon mitigation, and other ecosystem services with these strategies and their implications for the policy and market mechanisms necessary to realize their potential. The talk will conclude with a discussion on balancing nature-based solutions with engineered approaches to land-based carbon mitigation and highlight how each can play a role in reducing atmospheric carbon emissions.
Madhu Khanna,
Alvin H. Baum Family Chair and Director of Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dr. Madhu Khanna is the ACES Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and Alvin H. Baum Family Chair and Director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is at the intersection of agricultural, energy and environmental economics. She has served on the USEPA Science Advisory Board and as a Chair/member of panels and advisory committees for NIFA, USEPA and NSF and the National Academy of Sciences. She has also served as editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE) and on the Board of Directors of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) and the International Association of Agricultural Economics (IAAE). She is a University of Illinois Scholar, a Stanford Woods Institute of Environment Leopold Leadership Fellow, AAEA Fellow and AAEA past President, and fellow of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE).