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Editor’s choice
In this Q&A, Charlotte Wagner, a Senior Scientist at SEI US, discusses the importance of the new AFOLU tool integrated into SEI’s flagship energy modelling software, LEAP.
As countries work to strengthen their climate commitments, emissions from agriculture, forestry and land use are gaining increasing attention. These sectors play a critical role in national greenhouse gas profiles and offer significant opportunities for cost-effective mitigation, yet planning efforts have often been fragmented and difficult to integrate with energy-sector analyses.
To address this gap, SEI has developed the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) Tool: an integrated, policy-oriented modelling approach that enables planners and decision-makers to design robust, transparent, and ambitious mitigation scenarios for AFOLU emissions. By embedding AFOLU analysis within the widely used Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP), the tool supports coherent, cross-sectoral climate planning and helps translate mitigation potential into actionable strategies.
Learn more in this Q&A with AFOLU Tool developer Charlotte Wagner.
What exactly is the SEI AFOLU tool?
The SEI AFOLU tool provides the structure and methodology to carry out climate mitigation planning for the agriculture, forestry and land use sectors. It is integrated into the Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP), another keystone SEI tool, which is employed by more than 75 000 users to create medium- and long-term energy systems and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trajectories.
As a result, the tool is accessible to planners and policy makers already using LEAP who want to develop high-quality mitigation scenarios and increase ambition in the AFOLU sectors.
The AFOLU tool also leverages LEAP’s scenario-building capabilities, user-friendly interface and reporting capacity. Users can explore different management strategies, allowing the prioritization of key areas for mitigation action. This can also help communicate climate mitigation strategies.
Who is it for?
This tool is intended for planners and policymakers developing climate mitigation strategies for the agriculture, forestry and land use sectors, especially in countries with important emissions and emission reduction potential in these sectors.
The AFOLU tool applies the methodology in the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories to estimate emissions of methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), and nitrous oxide (N2O). This means that emission inventories and mitigation scenarios can be easily aligned with national GHG inventories and transparency reporting guidelines.
Why did the SEI team develop the tool?
Non-energy emissions from agriculture, forestry and land use change are becoming increasingly important in national climate mitigation plans. Yet, until now, most planners had to use separate, stand-alone tools to develop mitigation plans for these sectors. This has made it difficult to produce integrated energy- and non-energy plans, analyse feedbacks between energy and non-energy sectors (such as those related to biomass energy), and identify the most effective mitigation actions across sectors.
Last but not least, it has meant that separate teams usually work on non-energy and energy climate mitigation analyses, aggravating existing silos between disciplines and government departments, and limiting opportunities for synergistic mitigation actions.
What does the SEI team hope to accomplish with the new tool?
We want to see users produce more ambitious, high-quality mitigation scenarios for non-energy emissions from the AFOLU sectors. Agriculture is the second highest-emitting sector after energy, accounting for about 12% of global emissions.
We also want to enable internally consistent energy and non-energy emissions planning and give more people access to the tools and methods required to do this.
Ideally, mitigation action targeting land use and land use change will increasingly feature in climate mitigation plans, which will offer many co-benefits such as increased climate resilience, better food security, and improved water management.
Tool / The AFOLU Tool assists with developing medium- and long-term greenhouse gas non-energy emission scenarios for agriculture, forestry and other land uses.
Tool / The Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP) is a powerful, versatile system for energy planning and climate change mitigation assessment.
Event on 22 June – 26 June in Pretoria / SEI and CCAC are hosting an in-person hands-on training workshop 22–26 June in Pretoria on SEI's LEAP software for climate and clean air planning in Africa.
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