 in your life. Good afternoon, everyone. Just giving a few seconds for people to come into the webinar. OK. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us for this panel on Accelerating Sustainable Land Use Policies in the United States as part of the Sustainable Development Solution Network's Zero Carbon Action Plan. My name's Gordon McCord. I'm a faculty member at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California in San Diego. And I'm a part of a team that put together this chapter on this particular part of the puzzle for decarbonizing the US by mid-century. A next slide, please. This has been a team effort, so we're going to plan the presentation according to the different sections that we covered in the chapter. So Jennifer Sklaru from George Mason is going to speak about siding renewable energy infrastructure. Mike Jacobson from Penn State on reforestation. David Cantor, my co-chair, from NYU on soil carbon storage and biofuels, and I'll talk at the end about promoting low carbon diets and reducing waste, all important pieces of the puzzle for decarbonizing. Importantly, Grace Wu at NCS was also a team member, a great expert in this field. She's unfortunately unable to join us today. But I'd like to thank all of my co-authors and also thank the team at SDSN, Cheyenne Maddox, Elena Crete, and Fiona Laird for helping us put all of this together. Next slide, please. So just to give a little bit of background, the zero carbon action plans work is unique in that it's providing a medium term framework for thinking about policies at the federal level for reaching zero and decarbonizing the United States by 2050. But unlike lots of other policy exercises, this one is sequential in that it comes from two-step exercises. The ZCAP draws from and expands on two prior SDSN reports. They're called Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the US from 2014, and the policy implications of deep decarbonization in the US. And the reason that that's important is because the first step before having a conversation on policies is to chart out the pathway to decarbonization from a technological feasibility point of view. And that's been the work of SDSN over the last few years. Importantly, the two reports I mentioned focus on the energy system, the transport system, and all of the parts of the system that would get us down to zero. But also, the land use piece will form an important part of the puzzle. And there's been a separate project that's been focused on the pathways to reaching sustainable land use in the US. That SDSN project is called FABL, the Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land Use, and Energy Project. And so what ZCAP does with regards to land use is not cover all of the policies that have to do with sustainability, but really focus on the touchpoints where the modeling that's been done so far and that provides very careful pathways to decarbonization, what the interfaces with policy are to the elements of that model. So for example, we'll focus on what does the energy modeling say about the land use requirements for renewable siding, about biofuel requirements for liquid fuels in 2050. The energy modeling tells us that the land sink needs to store 375 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year. And the FABL modeling, which models in an integrated fashion our land so that we can see when we have dietary changes and we have reforestation and we have changes in trade, when we have improvements in agricultural productivity and in livestock productivity, how much of do all of those changes add up to give us changes in the land sink? And it's only through integrated modeling that we can put all the pieces together and say, what's the actual policy challenge in a quantitative way? And what are the policies? What would they have to accomplish? So that's the philosophy of the project, starting with a pathways analysis. That's a technological pathway, both for the energy system as well as for the land use system. And now ZCAP is presenting the analogous project was what's the set of policies that would align us and put the country on those pathways that the integrated modeling has shown. So that's the idea. Next slide, please. And we'll begin with siding the renewable energy part of the puzzle. And my colleague, Jennifer Sklaru at George Mason, takes us there. Hi, everyone. So I'm Jennifer Sklaru, an assistant professor at George Mason University. And I teach and research on the food, energy, water, nexus. I'm not sure if everybody can see me. I think hopefully my video is on. And so I teach and research on the food, energy, water, nexus. So the confluence of those three systems of food, energy, and water, particularly the institutional aspects, so policy frameworks at international, national, and local levels, and relationships between stakeholders. And I formerly was at the Department of Commerce prior to my work in academia. So experienced policy from that perspective. And before we talk about renewable energy infrastructure siding, I just wanted to talk briefly about why we're discussing renewable energy siding when a lot of our discussion is focused on land use and food. And the discussion of land use for decarbonization inherently involves the siding of renewable energy, because that will help us to meet our decarbonization goals. And so then by its nature, it also involves trade-offs and synergies with food production. So our recommendations focus on mitigating conflicts between sustainable production of energy and food and promoting synergies that advance decarbonization while supporting both clean energy and food production. Next slide, please. So if we talk about the land requirements for renewable energy siding, the model that Gordon referred to, the decarbonization targets, suggests that ground-mounted utility scale solar PV, so photovoltaic installations, will require about the land area of Vermont plus New Hampshire. So that's about 19,000 square miles. And the total onshore wind installation suggested by the model to meet our decarbonization goals would cover about the land area of New Mexico, so between 121,000 and 122,000 square miles. Next slide, please. So in this context, we need to establish some parameters for the siding that would enable renewable energy to contribute significantly to our decarbonization goals in an environmentally and economically sustainable and socially just way. So to do this, we need to have policies that address siding concerns due to environmental land use and social impacts, siding and permitting challenges for long distance and interconnection transmission infrastructure, and address the split federal and local responsibility for transmission and siding, that interstate piece of transmission and local level siding of transmission. So the bottom line is that integrative policies will be needed to frame transparent siding processes and financing mechanisms for research, development, demonstration, and deployment, project development, and host community impacts. Next slide, please. So to address these siding issues and challenges, we need policies that mandate development of integrated spatial planning for interstate projects as well as at state and local levels. And we need to include defined timelines for creation of these integrated plans in order to enable collaboration throughout the siding process to promote effective financial planning for renewable infrastructure investments and to avoid lock-in of infrastructure that may pose long-term negative ecological consequences. So one option for this is siding on contaminated or underutilized lands. And the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that about 2,000 gigawatts of solar PV, so solar photovoltaic potential, exists on 20 million acres of landfills and other contaminated or disturbed sites. And this area exceeds the total land area of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. And if you recall, that is what our model said we would need that amount of land for solar PV. So we recommend building on the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency's existing Repowering America's Land Initiative. And that initiative identifies sites' renewable energy potential and provides information on reusing sites for renewable energy development. But we recommend actually going beyond just providing information and actually adding structure and incentives for renewable development on contaminated or underutilized lands. And we also need to incorporate benefits for communities located close to these sites, but I will talk more about that in a few minutes. And I wanted to highlight some lessons from New York that helped us to frame some of our policy recommendations. The Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act, which was passed in New York in April, 2020 can serve as a model for federal legislation to concurrently advance decarbonization and sustainable land use. And this act has authorized NYSERDA, which is the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Their Clean Energy Resources and Development and Incentives Program to rapidly advance new build-ready projects and prioritize renewables development on existing or abandoned commercial sites, brownfields, landfills, or other underutilized sites. Next slide, please. So in addition to siting on contaminated or otherwise underutilized lands, we can also consider policies to site renewable energy facilities on federal lands, but we need to account for and address environmental effects and establish content and timing parameters for environmental impact assessments for siting of these facilities on federal lands. Next slide, please. In order to mitigate some of the conflicts that might arise in terms of land use and food for food production and energy, we also need financing mechanisms to support research on and promotion of small-scale siting and distributed generation. So for example, agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics, and I actually was gonna have a great background of me under solar panels with sheep, but I could not figure out how to get the background on my computer, so just try to picture it. Agrivoltaics is the co-location of agriculture and ground-mounted solar energy panels, so it is not the displacement of food production in place and substituting renewable energy production. It's complementarity between the two. So solar panels can be placed to provide shelter for livestock and also shade for plants, and that shade can also reduce the water you needed for irrigation. So it's a beneficial synergistic type of concept. And there are two programs that I wanted to highlight that are already in existence in the USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, that we can look at as kind of a launch pad, and so one is the Business Energy Investment Tax Credit, and this offers tax credits to sectors, including the agricultural sector for a range of on-site renewable energy technologies, but there are expiration dates for these credits and they vary by technology and project start date. So we feel that a framing policy is needed to expand and ensure the longevity of this program to promote the decarbonization goals. The second program I wanted to highlight is the Rural Energy for America program REAP, and this is another example of an existing federal financing mechanism that can promote Agrivoltaics or other on-site generation by mitigating upfront installation costs. So they provide financial assistance to agricultural producers and rural small businesses for renewable energy system purchases and energy efficiency improvements, but this program would benefit from federal state coordination to disseminate information to potential applicants, and it can also be linked to other long-term policy initiatives, including programs focused on decarbonization outcomes, not just practices, to promote its use and longevity. Next slide, please. So if we talk about the siting of renewable energy facilities, particularly grid-connected renewables, we need to address transmission siting also. So we need federal regulations that fairly allocate costs for long-distance transmission lines. We need transparent environmental impact assessment processes and timelines to enable accurate calculations of project development costs, time and environmental effects. And finally, we need support for research, development, demonstration and deployment to address technical challenges of conversion of our current system, which is high-voltage AC lines to high-voltage GC lines. And this is a conversation that's been, that third point is a conversation that's been going on for a while and there's been a lot of discussion, but it hasn't completely moved forward in the United States. It has moved forward in other countries. And I think we are finally at a point where we can have that conversation based on the need to still address some of the technical issues and some of the economic issues, but it's becoming a much more viable solution that would mitigate some of the conflicts over adding new transmission lines to accommodate new renewables. So once again, there are some lessons from New York. So they have a state power grid study and investment program under their new act, which identifies investments in distribution and local and bulk transmission necessary to meet the state's requirements under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. And the program also authorizes an expedited permitting process for transmission projects planned for existing rights of way. So once again, mitigating some of those conflicts over new sighting. Next slide, please. So finally, this brings us to addressing impacted communities. All of the sighting that we're talking about will affect the communities that host these sites and downstream and elsewhere in a variety of ways. So we need regulatory and financing frameworks to engage these impacted communities in the sighting process and in compensation decisions. We need streamlined, transparent, environmental impact assessments with defined timelines, plus established funding mechanisms to address effects on endangered and threatened species. We need incentives for host communities, particularly when facilities provide interstate power. We need requirements that localities and states create transparent processes for host community input. And we need funding for green workforce training in host communities with program models and guidelines. Yet again, there are lessons from New York that we were able to derive. So the Office of Renewable Energy Sighting under the new act is a centralized forum to promote predictability and timeliness of sighting decisions. They provide opportunities for local community input. They provide efficient, effective environmental reviews, wildlife conservation considerations, and host community economic benefits. So overall, this very recent New York legislation offers a model for state level action as well as federal policies, like the ones that I've described, on renewable energy sighting that can contribute to our decarbonization goals through integrated planning, mitigating land use conflicts and promoting energy and environmental justice. Next slide, please. I guess that's me. Hi, everyone. You can hear me and see the slides. I'm Mike Jacobson at Penn State. I work in the Department of Ecosystems, Science and Management. And I'm gonna just talk about the role of trees and forest and focus on reforestation as an important strategy. Next slide, please. So let's start with a little bit of history to see where we situated here in the U.S. and what's going on. If you look back at history, in around 1920, we were really deforested. So keep that in mind when we think about places to reforest. Now we have about 30% of our land area covered with forest and we have more trees growing than we cut. And importantly, most of our forests are private, so they have to be engaged in this reforestation process. Next slide, please. So just to tell you the types of forest management mitigation measures, the one I'm talking about is the one on the top where we actually increase in the carbon stock by growing trees. You could also talk about reducing deforestation, which is the many programs in the tropics like red that look at stabilizing losses. And then there's energy activities that also can mitigate climate change. Next slide, please. So I didn't put the reference in here, got left out, but this is from Foggioni's paper from Nature Conservancy in 2018 on natural climate solutions. And they did some really extensive analysis of land use mitigation potential. And as you can see that forestry, reforestation and natural forest management by far have the most potential of any other of the land uses mentioned. There was about 20 of them. Next slide, please. So we based and obviously in my short time, I'm just gonna talk about a few ideas and programs. We'll be basing our pathway on the White House report that was done during the Obama administration. They talked about 20 to 40 million acres needed to contribute to these goals of zero carbon by 2050. And other studies like the Foggioni went upwards of 60 plus million hectares depending on the types of land use and where they include pasture land and things like that. So what would that entail to reach about 40 million acres over the next 30 years with about 1.3 million hectares, sorry, hectares per year? And you can see there the amounts of telegrams of CO2 that will be sequestered from this process. Next slide, please. So just a little more detail on the approach. So the idea is to take sort of non-forest land and create forest cover. And those are sort of some definitions. We talk about 25% tree cover. But the important thing is where this is gonna occur and that's gonna take some more work, but we're hoping it occurs on these ecosystems that used to have trees. So if you remember that 1920 slide where there was a lot of deforestation in the US, those are the kind of lands we wanna target. Obviously more GIS and other types of work is needed to identify these locations. And that's not a trivial task. And then obviously private land owners, as you saw from that first slide would need to be engaged and estimates of reforestation can be upwards of about $900 per hectare. Next slide, please. So quickly I'll talk about four kinds of funding approaches, but importantly, I mentioned, we really need to lay out where this potential is and what the costs are and what the actual sequestration would be over the next 30 years. I'll talk about each of these funding sources, the federal cost share programs, federal tax programs, state and local programs and forest carbon programs in a little more detail. Next slide, please. So from the federal level in the farm bill, there are cost share programs that provide incentives for conservation measures and either they establishment costs or one-time payments, or they recurring annual rental payments. And here's some examples of programs equipped conservation reserve program. None of them are really dedicated to tree planting. So the idea would be perhaps through the farm bill or other mechanisms at the federal level to create a dedicated reforestation program. And we could also look at it in terms of not only as these other programs are on a per acre basis, but think about cost share in terms of tree planting and mounts, tons of quested or how well these trees are performing. Next slide, please. On the tax side, there are some tax programs that provide incentive to private landowners like the reforestation tax incentive program. It's been around a while. It's basically a tax deduction and then you can amortize any amount over that $10,000 over eight year period. But the program used to have a tax credit, which is a much better incentive because it's off the bottom line of your tax bill instead of off the just a gross income. So maybe a way to incentivize tree reforestation is to re-institute these tax credits. A couple of other opportunities. There is cost share payment exclusion, which could be increased or incentivized from that previous slide where I talked about those cost share payments. And then casually lost deductions is a huge issue now when we have hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, et cetera. And there's very little that the IRS provides in compensation for these extremely bad disasters with respect to climate change. So maybe through casually lost deductions, there could be more ways, and I could discuss this further. Next slide, please. At the state and local level, they have many policies that they can influence because they deal a lot with land use like green growth, zoning, hunting and fishing. And they do provide local technical assistance to landowners. But on the property incentive slide, can you just click the next? So what happens is with property taxes, we have development pressure and obviously there's a vicious cycle. So as cost of services go up, taxes go up and landowners are forced to develop. So actually every state in the union has a preferential property tax to both farmers and forest landowners. They vary dramatically across states, but perhaps better incentives, full property tax reductions could incentivize more forest land use and reforestation. Next slide, please. And finally, the fourth program are these forest carbon programs, mostly voluntarily right now, since we don't have any mandates in the US, the Chicago Climate Exchange created a lot of these programs and some of them are still going market-based approaches. And the Nature Conservancy and the American Forest Foundation have instituted some projects in a number of states, about eight states. And you can look it up, the American Forest Carbon Initiative that gives incentives to landowners. That's mostly on extending their rotations and keeping their forest forested. Not that you can't harvest, but the idea is to obviously get them some credits for the public good they're providing through sequestering carbon. And then they groups out there like Blue Source to do aggregating of private landowners and large holders. It's actually, especially the large industry are really interested in these carbon markets as an additional source of income in addition to their timber production. And so the idea is to match up these willing voluntary carbon sellers to the buyers who are mostly companies who want to offset their emissions. Next slide, please. So finally, I think it's not a trivial task. It's going to be daunting to kind of think about reforesting 1.3 million hectares a year but incentives will be key as I've tried to mention. I think a key issue is these recurring costs and things like leakage and what happens if there's a fire? Do they have to repay these incentive payments and can we vary the payments over time depending on the growth rates, the volume and things like that? And then finally, I mean, it's very important, we talked about siding and all these other land uses that we're going to talk about with the idea is to complement not to compete. And you saw with that Foggioni graph that showed reforestation and improved forest management number one, we want to complement that as well by their known as perhaps extending their rotations and adding more carbon to their forest, match that with the reforestation activities. And then finally, the other measures like the national forest being expanding, reforesting private lands as I mentioned and land transfers and conservation easements can also play a role. So I'll be happy to discuss this in more detail and there's obviously more information in our report. So I'll turn to the next slide and I think it's over to Dave. Thanks Mike. Hi everyone, my name is David Cantor. I'm an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University and vice chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative. And I want to talk to you about what we've written as a report on soil carbon storage and biofuels. And this is perhaps a good opportunity also to outline the scope of this chapter and of the broader report and what we don't include in this chapter, right? The scope of this report is really about the role and this chapter is the role that land can play in helping to decarbonize the energy system and our industrial system and also the role that land can play in the widespread adoption and implementation of negative emissions technologies and practices. So practices and technologies that remove carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. And so what we don't consider in this chapter are changes in livestock production either on the demand side or much on the supply side, a little bit that Gordon will be talking to you about. And we also don't look at other land management approaches like nutrient management, for example, both of which are incredibly important and dealt extensively in other literature and other reports and we're happy to share those with you. But just to be clear as terms of kind of the scope of what we're looking at here. And so one of those important negative emissions technologies and practices that we're looking at is soil carbon storage. So next slide, please. So increasing soil carbon storage will make a significant contribution to decarbonization. Just one practice alone, which is the use of cover crops on US crop land that does currently plant cover crops could store an additional 100 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is much more than what would be needed from soil carbon storage to reach decarbonization in the United States by 2050. Other practices that could be used include better residue management, the use of crop cultivars with deeper rooting systems, better fire management or grazing management and better nutrient management. So even though we're not explicitly talking about some of those things, they are part of the soil carbon sequestration strategy. Now there are four pillars that we identified that it would be very important to implement if we were to have large scale soil carbon storage in the United States as part of our decarbonization plan. And the first is a robust monitoring, reporting and verification system. One of the key uncertainties and hesitations about widespread adoption of soil carbon is, well, how reliable is it? How do we have reliable management measurements of the short-term storage capacity and especially the long-term storage capacity of carbon in soils? And so there needs to be significant investments in better empirical measurements but also better modeling of soil carbon in different cropping systems, different climates, different growing cultures and particularly how soil carbon responds to different environmental changes. Will soil carbon storage still be as effective in a changing and warming world? So significant investments in monitoring, reporting and verification are especially important. We estimate on average of about $250 to $500 million would need to be spent on such a system. And then secondly, there needs to be a significant increase in financing for existing conservation programs. So for example, one of the key conservation programs out there today that I believe Mike talked about is the conservation stewardship program, which pays farmers to adopt certain conservation practices and technologies and currently its budget is $1 billion and we recommend quintupling that to $5 billion to increase capacity and financing for farmers to adopt these practices that would enhance soil carbon storage over time. There are other interesting policies that we would suggest exploring which try to address the fact that many if not most environmental policies in the agricultural sector in this country are voluntary, they're incentive-based. And so that while that is understandable given the political system in this country, it's not ideal to get widespread adoption of best management practices. And so we would consider looking at other more innovative policy approaches such as crop insurance reform, reducing crop insurance premiums if farmers are adopting these more resilient and climate friendly climate practices because that makes their farms more resilient to climate change or conditionality, cross-compliance where farmers can only continue to receive certain subsidies if they adopt certain best management practices. These are ideas that have already been implemented in places like the European Union but thinking a bit more innovatively both at the federal level but also at the state level about new policy approaches. Then in terms of extension, right? Financing will only get you so far if you aren't simultaneously working with farmers to help them adopt over the long term these new practices and technologies. And so we advocate tripling the current extension work for specifically in the NRCS the Natural Resources Conservation Service which is part of the USDA from about 12,000 people now to around 30,000 which wouldn't just be good in terms of increasing farmer adoption, education on these issues but also would be important in terms of job creation particularly in parts of the country that you might not otherwise see such extensive job creation. And then public-private partnerships working with the private sector throughout the supply chain to help reduce food waste and recycle that waste as amendments to agricultural land because recycling of waste and increasing the amount of organic inputs to agricultural land is a key strategy for increasing soil carbon storage. So some of these kind of circular economy approaches could also be very important. So that's soil carbon and I'll get to biofuels now. So just to take a step back biofuels are actually going to be at least according to our plan an important part of a decarbonized US economy but a niche part in the sense that we expect most light duty vehicles so your passenger cars for example to be mostly electrified by 2035 which means that the sectors that biofuels would be used in would be in those sectors that are harder to electrify so think heavy duty vehicles think aviation, think shipping and we estimate according to the fable work that Gordon pointed out at the beginning there that about 80% of the biofuels by 2050 would come from second generation biofuels so not ethanol but crops like miscanthus and switchgrass and so we estimate that by 2050 you're looking at about four million barrels of biofuel production per day which is four times the current production of ethanol per day. So how do you actually get there? So we identify these three pillars that would be very important to do that. The first is increased research, development, demonstration and deployment into next generation biofuels specifically into non food sources of biofuels so by that we mean cellulosic so from biofuels derived from say crop residues or other waste streams or algae biofuels. Both of those are quite promising and we would want to explore that to avoid this food versus energy trade off that otherwise arises quite frequently in the discussion around biofuels. Coupled with that and one of the key drivers of innovation in addition to increased R&D would need to be a strong policy signal and that could be achieved through a low carbon fuel standard where we would advocate and you can read more details on this in our transport chapter in the Z-CAP report advocate for a carbon intensity of at least 80% below gasoline and diesel but we'd also want to make sure that there were guardrails in there so that you didn't get conversion of non agricultural lands into crop land particularly land that has high soil carbon storage or a particular biodiversity value. So again, some of the same challenges that you see with renewable siting you also see with biofuels wanting to make sure because there is obviously a finite amount of land for multiple things that we need that land to do. So we'd want to make sure that those guardrails are in place so that you don't get these unintended negative consequences. And then finally, one also way to increase market demand for new biofuels is federal procurement standards. For example, the Department of Defense consumes almost a hundred million barrels of oil per year is a huge consumer. And so changes in their procurement standards could send a very strong market signal and reduce pricing, et cetera for these next generation biofuels which would be incredibly important and something that would be easily within the remit of the federal government. So I believe now I pass it over to Gordon. Thanks, David. So the biofuels discussion brings us dovetails nicely into the next topic. So next slide please. So about 40% of continental U.S. land is pasture land and cropland for the production of meat and animal feed. And this is really important because what it shows and what integrated modeling shows is that the evolution of the U.S. diet is a huge driver on how this system evolves into the future. So for example, if the U.S. diet evolves towards what the USDA considers a healthy diet which would increase the consumption of vegetables and fruits and nuts and decrease but not drive to zero the consumption of meat and other animal products, that would significantly reduce demand and open up a lot of land currently used for livestock and for livestock feed for other uses. And so for example, what often the community when hearing about large increases in biofuels to satisfy the demand that David just talked about, where's that land going to come from? If it's not going to come from an expansion of the agricultural land space in the U.S. at some other ecological cost, what you get when you reduce animals, animal products in the diet is you get a lot of land that opens up and could be made available for the production of feedstocks for these next generation biofuels. And this is the power and the importance of that integrated modeling when you're bringing in at the same time the biofuel needs as well as dietary changes, et cetera. So if we need to really change the U.S. diet by 2050 as a big part of the puzzle to solve this problem, what are the set of policy recommendations at our disposal? So the first is that a lot of programs align themselves with the Department of Health and Human Services and the USDA's published dietary guidelines. And in 2021, we've got an opportunity to update those dietary guidelines to really put sustainability deep inside those guidelines. And so this is something that was discussed before in previous revisions of dietary guidelines but really putting them front and center in 2021 could align dietary guidelines for lots of federal programs as well as for individual consumers and really signal the importance of making this transformation in what we eat, not only for our own health but also for planetary health. Climate-friendly certification is the idea of following the footsteps of the organic food set of interventions where if you've got a certification, then you've got a subset of consumers that are willing to pay a price premium in order to access and consume products that are climate-friendly. And that price premium would allow to pay for any differences in costs of production between the traditional way or what we've been doing until now and a different mode of production that would allow for lower carbon emissions in the process of producing the food. And so that price wedge that the organic sector is now enjoying thanks to the last few decades of certification actually translated into revealed preferences by consumers, doing that same thing for climate would allow for profitable production of lots of food products that could be labeled climate-friendly. There is a lot of influence of the federal government's food standards on provision in schools across the country. And so nutrition for school feeding programs or nutrition guidelines for school feeding programs would affect a whole lot of procurement for schools across the country, emphasizing not only health so that children are eating healthy when they're given food in schools across the country but the fact that that food should be low carbon and otherwise sustainable would advance and enhance the contribution of the procurement of food inside schools or for school feeding programs towards decarbonizing the diets of Americans. And then there are lots of support for low socioeconomic parts of the population that operate through food. So the community eligibility provision which gives free meals to students in poor areas of the country, the women infant children program, the supplemental nutrition assistant program, all of these which allow for procurement by the individual of food could be tailored in such a way to promote, generate incentives for nutritious food and for low carbon food. And so that's definitely one of the levers that would have large impact in how people consume food through these programs. And finally, there's direct government procurement of foodstuffs across all government facilities, federal, state and local across the entire country within our defense department. The defense department is a massive procurer of food products. All of these procurement processes of the government could be aligned with low carbon food options and would have a transformative effect. Next slide, please. And finally, we waste a whole lot of food both at the household level but also within retail in the United States. The last measurement was in 2010 that about 31% of food produced was wasted. And so obviously just for the reason I mentioned on the earlier slide, reducing these wastes would reduce aggregate demand for food products and lessen the pressures on land for agricultural and livestock production. The EPA and the USDA have a published goal of reducing food waste by 50% by 2030. And there's a whole host of ideas on what are policies and guidance that can be given to the states in terms of doing that. This is a largely understudied and under measured problem. And so we'd actually have to put a lot of investment into standardizing measurements and collecting data at high spatial resolution across different actors in society to really know where most of the problem is occurring and be able to monitor progress as we make investments in trying to reduce food loss and waste. Where the problems have to do with harvest storage facilities, we could, the government could back loans for on-farm harvest storage to try to make it cheaper to store food better and reduce food loss. We could, the federal government and then state and local governments could invest in messaging to the population on the importance of food stewardship so that people understand that food waste aggregates up to be a significant source of pressure on the ecosystem and land use in the country. We could distinguish sell by dates and use by dates such that people can distinguish reductions in the product's quality after a certain date versus a product just simply not being safe to eat or safe to consume after a certain date. So separating those two would be enormously useful. Certainly public reporting of food waste and recycling by private actors would be a way to empower civil society and the advocacy sector to shame bad actors into better improvement. We're gonna need lots of R&D and tech into thinking about innovative ways to reduce food waste across our society and so tax incentives for that R&D can be helpful. And finally, incentives for recovery and recycling of food waste for animal feeding composting. Again, just another way to try to reduce the overall pressure on the system. Next slide, please. So, and I'll invite David to join me for this slide also. So this is just to conclude, we've given kind of more specific recommendations on the individual pieces of the puzzle, but then we also offer a few large scale recommendations on the integrated land challenge and three of them are listed here. I'll let David talk about the first two and I'll jump in for the last one. Sure, so the first is essentially to set up a new government funding agency akin to what has been already set up for the energy sector and for defense. So DARPA and ARPA-E, we would suggest creating an ARPA land to focus on all the scientific research that needs to be done to try and address all these complex technical challenges of decarbonization of the land sector. So this could include, again, better monitoring, reporting and verification technologies for soil carbon, funding into next generation biofuels, funding for animal protein substitutes, funding for better ways to recycle, retrieve, and restore the quality of food loss and waste through innovations in packaging and in other means. So we see that as a really important overarching policy recommendation. And then the second is an inter-agency task force. These task force are often put in place to deal with issues that cross the jurisdictions of multiple federal agencies and departments. So climate change, for example, has often had an inter-agency task force. And the fact of the matter is that multiple agencies and departments across the US federal government have jurisdiction over land, whether it be defense, whether it be energy, agriculture, interior. And so there needs to be a coordination on all these issues that we've talked about today, whether it be renewable siting, soil carbon, et cetera, in order to manage the potential trade-offs and maximize the synergies and just in general increase of communication across these important agencies, as well as with local and state government. So Gordon, I'll hand it over to you for the last one. Yeah, and just the last point to be very brief because it would be good to get to the questions. All of this has to be underpinned by an analytical exercise within government that knows how to trade off all the challenges that David just mentioned. So we need to use our land not only to act as a sink for the greenhouse gas challenge, but we know that land has to produce the food that we consume and we trade massive amounts of food across the world. So whatever our solution is has to be embedded inside a coherent global economy on the food trade. We need to use land in a way that conserves biodiversity and ecosystem function in ways other than greenhouse gas emissions. We need to plan for urban expansion and transportation networks and the siting challenges that Jennifer spoke about at the beginning. All of this has to happen in a way where you're coordinated across federal, state, local jurisdictions, you've got public and private land ownership. So this is an enormously complicated problem and an interagency task force would require a set of spatially explicit tools that let the government explicitly trade off different scenarios moving forward. And those kinds of tools, often certainly at national level, don't exist at high spatial resolution. And this is a direction that we have to move in as a country, not only us, but all countries if we're really gonna thread the needle of using our land in a way that intelligently walks all of these trade-offs over the next few decades and is a part of the solution to decarbonizing society overall. So let's stop there. And David, I think you're moderating the Q&A. I'll invite all of my colleagues to come back with our cameras on. Thanks, everyone, for all the questions so far. And please, for those of you who still have questions, we have about 10 minutes for Q&A, so please feel free to put them in the Q&A. There were several questions for Jennifer, a couple kind of around a similar theme around taking, for example, local community and particularly minority community concerns into account in renewable siting and then linked to that, these kind of rural versus urban political divisions on renewable siting. And I was wondering if you could speak to that perhaps. Sure, actually I would love to because my research has found some of the same findings that some of the attendees were raising in Virginia. So I have also seen this rural urban divide and this concern particularly from farm owners that their land would be overtaken by solar panels or pressured by utilities to put solar panels there that wouldn't even be providing power for those communities. And that is exactly what we are trying to avoid with our recommendations. So our recommendations are intended to focus on integrated spatial planning that encompasses the energy and food considerations, land considerations, and also engagement of the stakeholders in those local communities. So it affects directly on the communities, not just the economic effects but the environmental effects, livelihood effects, food effects. So in doing that, we actually looked at, I didn't raise this in the presentation but I also looked at American Farmland Trust, Smart Solar siting partnership project as a model for ways in which to engage stakeholders. So their suggestion of having a multi-stakeholder coalition is something that we could consider doing across the federal agencies and drawing in local community stakeholders as well to address some of these concerns and ensure that the local communities are being heard and that they are reaping benefits from whatever might be happening. But it's also the same reason that we've been promoting use of underutilized or contaminated lands and not promoting farmland use. So it's one thing if the farmers actually want their land to be used that way, it's different if they don't and those voices would need to be heard and that is why we framed it as integrated spatial planning. Thank you, Jennifer. There's an interesting question here for you, Mike from, and I apologize if I'm getting this name wrong, Josh Sidel asks about whether a reforestation program could be specific enough to recommend specific tree species that are unique to specific ecosystems and what the risks if that weren't to happen? Yeah, thanks for the question, Josh. Absolutely, I think we need to tailor our tree species to the location and given that we're having climate change, we need to be thinking proactively of trees that will be still able to grow in changing climate. So for example, I see you on the southeastern coastal plain. A lot of that area is traditionally a longleaf pine. I think that's the kind of native species we want to encourage. And so I would promote native species over exotics as we introduce this mass reforestation effort. Thanks, Mike. Gordon, for you giving, you're presenting on the food and dietary side. There's a question here about if non-animal protein was to make kind of a significant inroads into the market, what implications that would have for our carbon targets and more generally for US carbon emissions? Yeah, I think that that's a great question. I haven't seen studies of what the implications would be of really large scale diffusion of these plant-based meat product substitutions. They may vary quite a bit according to the production method of the plant-based substitute in terms of its resource and energy intensity. My instinct is that they're likely to be helpful. So if the counterfactual is that we continue eating meat from animals, then a plant-based meat substitute is gonna be helpful compared to a world where we eat just pure vegetables and nuts and fruits and reduce the overall meat or meat substitute consumption and that may lead you to a different conclusion. But I'm guessing it's gonna vary a little bit product by product. And I don't know if there's an overarching conclusion in terms of what's the percentage gain from the ecosystem point of view of moving over to different plant-based substitutes. But my instinct is it would be helpful. And the question is how does it compare to moving from eating steak once a week to eating a plant-based substitute of steak once a week versus just not eating steak at all? And I think that that's likely to vary by product. There's a question here about whether there's a big food versus energy conflict right now. I'm happy to take a first stab at that but if anyone else wants to come in, I think really the risk of or the debate around land used for food production versus energy production is particularly looking forward as we continue to increase global population levels to a projected 10 billion people by the middle of this century. All those people will need food, all those people will need energy. And particularly as we bring more and more people into the middle class, generally, at least historically, diets have shifted towards more meat-intensive diets and those require more land to grow feed for those animals. And then on top of that, you impose environmental pressures like climate change, which will make our agricultural land less productive. And that's where you really have this food versus energy debate, which is why, for example, for biofuels, we would emphasize for research to really be made in ones that don't compete with crop land. So cellulosic biofuels, so those that can rely on crop residues or other waste streams, like food waste, or from algae, again, kind of trying to find ways to not compete as much with the food system. But again, if coming back to the animal protein argument, if people were to consume less animal protein, given that over 60% of the food that we grow goes not to us, but to animals, then it would obviously free up space there. We have a couple of minutes left. There are some kind of overarching questions that I think are interesting. One is about whether we thought about the kind of increasing encroachment, I guess, of urban spaces and suburban spaces into rural land and the implications for agriculture for biodiversity, presumably for renewable siting. I don't know if anyone wants to kind of jump in first. Jennifer, I see you nodding. So yeah, this is something else actually that my research has focused on recently because the debate has been not just over renewable siting versus farmland preservation, but also development, urban development, suburban development in some of these same areas. So again, I know I'm gonna sound like I'm repeating myself, but this integrated spatial planning that combines the stakeholder views and the needs. So primarily the needs, right? Needs assessments for these different areas and where the energy needs will shift. I mean, I saw the question, it's a good question because the energy needs definitely shift as you develop these areas. And that would be one reason to look more closely at where that development is happening and where that energy is being cited so that it is cited close to the community and you're not using farmland that could otherwise be used as farmland to produce power for a community that isn't right there. So again, integrated spatial planning and stakeholder engagement to figure out how to best model and map the siting of the energy to be located near where it needs to go. I think that also probably speaks to the question on wildlife corridors as well. This was a big part of Grace Wu's work with the Nature Conservancy who unfortunately couldn't join us today about making sure that in addition to finding enough land to put, to settle these renewables that we need to make sure that we're protecting all these other land uses. And this gets to the integrated spatial planning or what you were talking about. I think I'm aware of the time now and we're kind of coming up to the end of things now. And but I would encourage everyone, there have been some great questions here and we really appreciate it. And if you have any follow-ups to please follow up either with us individually or with Cheyenne Maddox who's very kindly and ably kind of been running this group. And so I think with that, I don't know Gordon do you wanna see us out maybe? Just to thank everybody, not only my co-presenters and co-conspirators here in preparing the chapter for all of the time and the effort but also to everyone who's joined us for this hour. This is very much ongoing work. We focused on the federal level but we were just having a conversation beforehand and relevant to the questions that we're just asked now for how much of this problem is gonna have to be solved at the state and local level. And so really making that translation of a set of policy recommendations for the federal government down to where the rubber hits the road on integrated spatial planning locally is where a lot of the work remains over the next few decades. So we'd welcome communication with all of you who are interested in those issues and we thank you for your time. And I see Cheyenne's sharing contact information. And so is Jennifer, which is great. So all of that is there and we look forward to being in touch and thank you to everyone for joining us and thanks to the SDSN staff for organizing this webinar and the report. Take care, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.