Greenhouse gas mitigation by agricultural intensification

By Jennifer Burney, David B. Lobell. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010

1,122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As efforts to mitigate climate change increase, there is a need to identify cost-effective ways to avoid emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Agriculture is rightly recognized as a source of considerable emissions, with concomitant opportunities for mitigation. Although future agricultural productivity is critical, as it will shape emissions from conversion of native landscapes to food and biofuel crops, investment in agricultural research is rarely mentioned as a mitigation strategy. Here we estimate the net effect on GHG emissions of historical agricultural intensification between 1961 and 2005. We find that while emissions from factors such as fertilizer production and application have increased, the net effect of higher yields has avoided emissions of up to 161 gigatons of carbon (GtC) (590 GtCO2e) since 1961. We estimate that each dollar invested in agricultural yields has resulted in 68 fewer kgC (249 kgCO2e) emissions relative to 1961 technology ($14.74/tC, or ∼$4/tCO2e), avoiding 3.6 GtC (13.1 GtCO2e) per year. Our analysis indicates that investment in yield improvements compares favorably with other commonly proposed mitigation strategies. Further yield improvements should therefore be prominent among efforts to reduce future GHG emissions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/977c80cae562c86e67f1733bd4a17afe8e827061

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Citations in the corpus

Advances in Remote Sensing of Agriculture: Context Description, Existing Operational Monitoring Systems and Major Information Needs (2013, background): “• greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land clearing, crop production and fertilization contribute already to 1/3 of global GHG emissions [24]; • global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles have been disrupted, with impacts on water quality, aquatic ecosystems and marine fisheries [25,26]; • freshwater res”
Climate adaptation as mitigation: the case of agricultural investments (2013, methodology): “The simplest approach is to specify different scenarios of what total food consumption would have been in the absence of yield growth, and then to compute associated cropland area requirements [7].”
Global change pressures on soils from land use and management (2016, background): “, 2004), and use of cover crops during fallow periods to provide year-round C inputs (Burney et al., 2010; Poeplau & Don, 2015).”
Land property rights, agricultural intensification, and deforestation in Indonesia (2018, background): “The reason is that no agricultural system is able to sustain the same level of biodiversity and ecosystem functions as provided by tropical rainforest (Burney et al., 2010; Clough et al., 2016).”
The Dynamics of Climate Change Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review of Climate-Smart Agriculture among Small-Scale Farmers (2019, background): “While production methods that are less intensive with lower output can be beneficial to the immediate environment, such practices may require that farmlands are put into use elsewhere to close the gap created by the lowered production, eventually resulting in a higher overall impact [57].”
Closing the yield gap while ensuring water sustainability (2018, background): “…impacts associated with the irrigation of cultivated lands (e.g., changes in microclimate, habitat, and land use (Sacks et al 2009), energy costs and associated greenhouse emissions (Burney et al 2010), and infrastructure development (Blanc and Strobl 2013)) which require further investigation.”
Control of crop diseases through Integrated Crop Management to deliver climate-smart farming systems for low- and high-input crop production (2021, background): “Moreover, these cultivars are susceptible to pathogens that cause diseases and the chemicals used to protect them can degrade natural resources such as soil, water, and biodiversity, leading to limited growth in crop productivity (Burney et al., 2010).”
GM crops: global socio-economic and environmental impacts 1996- 2007 (2008, background): “This provides for additional cost savings such as reduced labour and fuel costs associated with ploughing, additional moisture retention and reductions in levels of soil erosion; 4 For example, relating to HT soybeans; USDA 1999, Gianessi & Carpenter 2000, Qaim & Traxler 2002, Brookes 2008; relating”
Sustainable Intensification: What Is Its Role in Climate Smart Agriculture? (2014, background): “Globally, total crop yields — mostly cereal and oil crops — increased by 135% between 1961 and 2005 while the area of cropland increased by only 27% [13] (though degree of cropland expansion varies significantly amongst regions).”
Three perspectives on sustainable food security: efficiency, demand restraint, food system transformation. What role for life cycle assessment? (2014, background): “, 2012) As recognition of the contribution that agriculturally induced land use change makes to food’s GHG emissions has grown, (Burney et al., 2010; FAO, 2006) so the need to raise productivity so as to ‘spare’ land from further agricultural encroachment and associated CO2 release is emphasised.”
Land-use futures in the shared socio-economic pathways (2017, background): “…agricultural area and an increase in agricultural productivity through increases in modern inputs such as new crop varieties, machinery, irrigation water, fertilizer and pesticides (Foley et al., 2005; Rudel et al., 2009; Tilman et al., 2011; Burney et al., 2010; Steinfeld and Gerber, 2010).”