Agricultural productivity and greenhouse gas emissions: trade-offs or synergies between mitigation and food security?

By Hugo Valin, Petr Havlík, Aline Mosnier, Mario Herrero, Erwin Schmid, Michael Obersteiner. 2013

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this letter, we investigate the effects of crop yield and livestock feed efficiency scenarios on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture and land use change in developing countries. We analyze mitigation associated with different productivity pathways using the global partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM. Our results confirm that yield increase could mitigate some agriculture-related emissions growth over the next decades. Closing yield gaps by 50% for crops and 25% for livestock by 2050 would decrease agriculture and land use change emissions by 8% overall, and by 12% per calorie produced. However, the outcome is sensitive to the technological path and which factor benefits from productivity gains: sustainable land intensification would increase GHG savings by one-third when compared with a fertilizer intensive pathway. Reaching higher yield through total factor productivity gains would be more efficient on the food supply side but halve emissions savings due to a strong rebound effect on the demand side. Improvement in the crop or livestock sector would have different implications: crop yield increase would bring the largest food provision benefits, whereas livestock productivity gains would allow the greatest reductions in GHG emission. Combining productivity increases in the two sectors appears to be the most efficient way to exploit mitigation and food security co-benefits.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8da3b41dfedaa765c6d201d2f76179f097902826

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Citations in the corpus

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture without compromising food security? (2017, background): “…mitigation requirements (Chakravarty et al 2009, Wollenberg et al 2016) and ‘win-win’ mitigation options i.e. soil carbon (SOC) sequestration or sustainable intensification (Smith et al 2008, Tilman et al 2011, Valin et al 2013) that both reduce agricultural emissions and increase foodproduction.”
Global exposure and vulnerability to multi-sector development and climate change hotspots (2018, methodology): “use efficiency [61, 62] and downscaled GLOBIOM distribution projections of crop and”
Climate-smart agriculture global research agenda: scientific basis for action (2014, background): “Along with these adaptive actions, CSA seeks to contribute to the mitigation and reduction of GHG, mainly nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) emissions, and to balance trade-offs with food security and livelihoods [7,37,38].”