When Does the Integration of Mitigation and Adaptation in the Land Use Sector Actually Makes Sense?

The phenomenon of climate change is addressed through two main strategies: mitigation and adaptation. It is broadly recognized that both strategies are interrelated, yet in the land use sector this connection is particularly strong. In fact, the mentioned sector is one of the most promising areas to combine mitigation and adaptation into a single intervention. In spite of its potential, in practice mitigation and adaptation are still treated as two different policy instruments. Concerns about efficiency have emerged as a result of such a dichotomy. However, how to manage an integrated implementation of mitigation and adaptation is still poorly understood. In this research paper, enabling conditions for an enhanced policy outcome in the land use sector were studied. Specifically, a dynamic optimization problem based on the concept of forest transition – the process of changes in forest cover over time as a country or region develops in social and economic terms – was suggested and solved. Forest transition was used to define initial value problems. After that, steady states were characterized for an unregulated economy and different policy configurations. The results show that partial policy interventions (only adaptation or only mitigation) improved the unregulated economy situation but delivered sub-optimal land allocation. It is only under an integrated implementation that optimality can be restored.