The cattle sector, both emissions- and land-intensive, represents a great opportunity for mitigation through reforestation. In this paper, we study the efficiency of land-use regulation. Our analytical results indicate that the subsidy is the best alternative policy to emissions tax, provided that the elasticities of land use and emissions to cattle feeding are close. Interestingly, we show that the optimal meat tax should integrate the carbon opportunity cost of land use.
Our analysis of the Climate Risks and Opportunities Index (CRORI) and the CDP climate score reveal a parallel improvement of these indices with different sectoral disparities over the 2015–2019 period. While our results are encouraging, they need to be put into perspective because these firms are still far from being carbon neutral.
