Land-Based Resources

See also: Setting Up a Land-based Resource Assessment

LEAP includes capabilities for modeling resources based on an assessment of land-use and land-use change. These features can currently be used to assess Biomass Energy Strategies (BESTs) of the type currently being conducted in a number of African countries, and form a foundation for future updates that will allow LEAP to be used for land-use change and forestry sector greenhouse gas mitigation assessment. 

These new capabilities are built upon a new set of screens that allow users to account for land-use in each region of their country and to describe alternative scenarios for land-use change by specifying land conversions from one type to another. These conversions can be used to account for changes such as deforestation caused by logging, expansion of agricultural lands, or reforestation and upgrading of the productivity of certain land types. LEAP can even track the supplies of wood generated by land clearances.

Land-use change scenarios form the basis for optionally specifying the availability of resources per unit of land area. This approach can be used to examine the availability of wood and other biomass energy resources, and can also be used to assess any disaggregated renewable resources such as wind or solar energy. When used for biomass energy strategies, LEAP can examine the detailed interactions between the demands for wood fuels in each region, including both direct energy and non-energy-related consumption of wood, and indirect demands for wood for making charcoal. It can also consider the transport of wood fuels among the regions of an area and between the area and the rest of the world. These requirements for wood can then be compared to supplies of wood coming from each land-type on each area. LEAP is also able to model different types of wood supplies including sustainable supplies from informally managed land types, supplies from land clearances (as a result of land-use conversions), supplies from  formal wood lots managed on a set harvesting regime, and short-term supplies from unsustainable cutting of wood stocks on informally managed lands. Outputs include estimates of wood supplies as well as the changes in wood stocks over time in each scenario. LEAP also considers how different land areas will have different levels of accessibility, so that wood in some land areas will not be cut regardless of demands, reflecting how some areas are protected or inaccessible. Results can be visualized in LEAP's Results view as charts, tables and maps.