| dc.description.abstract | Climate change and surface ozone have been proven to impose significant threats on crop productions and the interactions between these two factors further make the issue more complicated. Although the quantification of damages has been well established in the literature, the consideration of ozone-climate interactions is mostly absent from such studies. On the other hand, mitigation is recognized as one of the most important strategies to address climate change challenges and cellulosic ethanol production from biomass is a promising solution. This dissertation covers the above climate change-related topics in three essays.
The first essay explores ozone impacts on corn, soybeans, spring wheat, winter wheat, barley, cotton, peanuts, rice, sorghum, and sunflowers in the United States. We also incorporate a variety of climatic variables to investigate potential ozone-climate interactions. The results shed light on future yield consequences of ozone and climate change individually and jointly under a projected climate scenario. Our results suggest that the damages caused by climate change-induced ozone elevation are much smaller than the damages caused by the direct effects of climate change itself.
The second essay focuses on climate change and winter wheat, a stable crop that plays a critical role in food security and nutrient balance. We examine potentially differential climatic impacts depending on winter wheat’s growth stages, using data collected from China, the largest wheat producer in the world. We also address the concerns of short- and long-run climate effects and reveal the effects of long-run climate change adaptations. Our findings suggest that reductions in the number of freezing days induced by global warming have strong implications for climate change impacts on winter wheat yields. We find substantial long-run adaptation effects that could reverse the sign of climate impacts on winter wheat.
The third essay consists of two parts. We build life cycle analysis models to measure the environmental performance of a proposed Multi-Stream Integrated Biorefinery (MIBR) platform. The goal of the MIBR is to enhance the profitability and sustainability of lignocellulosic biofuel by producing valuable byproducts (i.e., carbon fiber) from lignin-containing biorefinery wastes. We also perform market analysis on carbon fiber to understand the current market and prospective market in the foreseeable future. Market penetration analysis suggests minimal price impacts of MIBR carbon fiber. However, scaling up the platform to a capacity level comparable with a corn ethanol plant will reduce carbon fiber price by 28%, posing challenges to the profitability of lignin-based byproducts. | |
