Henning Steinfeld

Global Potentials for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in Agriculture

Improved management of agricultural lands and other terrestrial areas offers considerable potential to mitigate climate change. Currently, 83% of the world’s land area is directly influenced by human interventions (Sanderson et al. 2002 cited in Kareiva et al. 2007), about half of the terrestrial earth’s surface is extensively managed and 25% is intensively managed (UNEP 2005).

Strategies and Economies for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in Agriculture

Agriculture can make significant contributions to climate change mitigation by (a) increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) sinks, (b) reducing GHG emissions, and (c) off-setting fossil fuel by promoting biofuels. The latter has the potential to counter-balance fossil fuel emissions to some degree, but the overall impact is still uncertain compared to emissions of non-CO2 GHGs, which are likely to increase as production systems intensify. Agricultural lands also remove CH4 from the atmosphere by oxidation, though less than forestlands (Tate et al. 2006; Verchot et al. 2000), but this effect is small compared to other GHG fluxes (Smith 2004).