The food system is one of the most significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, making the reduction of emissions in this sector a priority for policymakers around the world.
The food system is one of the most significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, making the reduction of emissions in this sector a priority for policymakers around the world. IIASA researchers explored the potential of carbon sequestration on farmland to combat climate change, offering insights into economic effects as well as its climate change mitigation potential.
Carbon sequestration on agricultural land refers to the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere in soil and plants on farms. According to the authors of a new IIASA study just published in Nature Food, these practices hold great potential for reducing global warming while reducing economy wide mitigation costs.
“We set out to assess novel carbon sequestration options on agricultural land and their dynamics in an economic model. To date, these options were only assessed in bottom-up engineering studies and hence not considered in Integrated Assessment Model-based climate stabilization pathways that underpin the forward-looking chapters of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” explains lead author Stefan Frank, a senior researcher in the Integrated Biosphere Futures Research Group of the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program. “Given the interlinkages across mitigation options, economic sectors, and world regions, integrated economic assessments like ours can provide valuable insights on the system-wide effects of these options.”
Read more at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
