One of President Joe Biden’s first post-inauguration acts was to realign the United States with the Paris climate accord, but a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine demonstrates that rising emissions from human land-use will jeopardize the agreement’s goals without substantial changes in agricultural practices.
One of President Joe Biden’s first post-inauguration acts was to realign the United States with the Paris climate accord, but a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine demonstrates that rising emissions from human land-use will jeopardize the agreement’s goals without substantial changes in agricultural practices.
In a paper published today in Nature, the team presented the most thorough inventory yet of land-use contributions to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (including nitrous oxide and methane) from 1961 to 2017, taking into account emissions from agricultural production activities and modifications to the natural landscape.
“We estimated and attributed global land-use emissions among 229 countries and areas and 169 agricultural products,” said lead author Chaopeng Hong, UCI postdoctoral scholar in Earth system science. “We looked into the processes responsible for higher or lower emissions and paid particularly close attention to trends in net CO2 emitted from changes in land use, such as converting forested land into farm acreage.”
The researchers learned that poorer countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa experienced the most pronounced surge in these “land-use change” emissions.
Read more at University of California - Irvine
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