Technological innovation and investment will be needed to reduce agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions to zero, according to new work from Carnegie Staff Associate Lorenzo Rosa and Visiting Scholar Paolo Gabrielli.
Technological innovation and investment will be needed to reduce agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions to zero, according to new work from Carnegie Staff Associate Lorenzo Rosa and Visiting Scholar Paolo Gabrielli. Their findings were recently published in Environmental Research Letters.
“Right now, farming is responsible for about 12 percent of all global greenhouse emissions,” Rosa explained. “Agriculture is not only a significant contributor to climate change; it is also one of the first victims of its consequences, including warming, drought, and altered precipitation patterns.”
Rosa and Gabrielli set out to analyze a variety of technologies for reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are released by agriculture to see how far these tools could take us on the road to zero emissions. Reducing agricultural emissions is particularly challenging because most agricultural greenhouse gas emissions come from methane and nitrous oxide, both of which have a much greater warming potential on short time scales than carbon dioxide.
Read More: Carnegie Institute for Science
A chart showing how different strategies for decarbonizing agriculture reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Photo Credit: Lorenzo Rosa and Paolo Gabrielli)
