Wide range of potential spillover effects under net-zero emissions pathways for Australia’s land sector: Policy settings for a sustainable transition

Abstract

The land sector has significant potential to contribute to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions commitments via changes in land-use and management. Land-use change however, can have spillover effects for a range of other socio-economic and environmental indicators. In this study, we identified net-zero pathways which mitigate trade-offs and capture co-benefits for the Australian land sector using a combination of exploratory scenario analysis and scenario discovery. Using machine learning-based surrogate models trained on the Land-Use Trade-Offs (LUTO) model, we identified many net-zero compliant scenarios at three different estimates of emissions abatement (low, medium, and high) requirement for the land sector and quantified their potential spillover effects. We found that significant land-use change may be required for Australia’s land sector to contribute to net-zero and that this has both trade-offs and co-benefits for economic returns, food production, biodiversity, and water resources. Crucially, the impacts of achieving net-zero on land-use change and spillover effects varied widely with both the level of land sector emissions abatement required and the policy settings within each abatement level. To illustrate, compared to the worst performing Medium abatement level pathway, the best performing pathway achieved 23.04 \$B yr^-1 more in economic returns, produced 28.76 \$B yr^-1 more food/fibre, and generated 23.24 % greater biodiversity services, but with a trade-off of 2.82 million ML yr^-1 more water use. We outline the specific policy settings required for a sustainable net-zero transition for the land sector (i.e., which avoid trade-offs and capture co-benefits) for the three abatement levels including carbon pricing, agricultural productivity gains, reduced barriers to adoption, and incentives to support biodiversity. The results illustrate the importance of a portfolio of well-designed, evidence-based policy interventions for supporting a sustainable transition to net-zero emissions.

Keywords

Net-zero emissions pathways / Land-use change / Scenario discovery / Sustainability transition / Trade-offs and co-benefits / Spillover effects

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Md Shakil Khan: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Resources, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Enayat A. Moallemi: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Conceptualization. Dhananjay Thiruvady: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Conceptualization. Asef Nazari: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Conceptualization. Raymundo Marcos Martinez: Writing – review & editing, Validation. Nicholas Van Schoten: Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Brett A. Bryan: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Deakin University Postgraduate Research scholarship and by funding from CSIRO.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100475.

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