A proposal for main parameter choices in the baseline and scenario choices has been submitted to consultation in February 2014 and updated in April to take into account received comments.The initial February proposal can be retrieved here.
The baseline assumptions relate to macro-economic, and energy and agricultural market developments. These parameters represent the exogenous drivers of the baseline. The range of plausible futures associated to these exogenous drivers (= determined outside the model) remains wide; the baseline development will also depend on model parameters that will be varied through the sensitivity analysis. This will lead to different developments of the model variables, for a same set of exogenous parameters. For instance, changing the elasticity of endogenous (= determined within the model) yield response can lead, for the same future food consumption patterns, to different land use changes.
The baseline will be compared with several policy scenarios. Several types of scenarios will be tested in this project.
- Feedstock specific shock aiming at characterizing the indirect land use change effect associated to each feedstock. The list of feedstock to be tested is currently under discussion with the stakeholders.
- Policy scenarios analyzing possible developments of the incorporation level and composition of biofuel used in EU transportation.
There is a large recognition of the sensitivity of land use change impacts to behavioural parameters in economic models. This will be performed through Monte-Carlo simulations, i.e. the GLOBIOM model will be run a large number of times, drawing random values of parameters in a plausible distribution, to produce an estimate of the results distribution.
Final baseline, scenarios and sensitivity analysis assumptions.