More Support for Agriculture’s Role in Sequestration

Worldwatch Institute has co-published a report that shows innovations in food production and land use, if scaled up now, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to roughly 25 percent of global fossil fuel emissions. Co-published by Ecoagriculture Partners, the report suggests that as the price of carbon rises with new caps on emissions and expanding markets for carbon offsets, the contribution of land-based, or “terrestrial,” carbon to climate change mitigation efforts could increase even further.

Industrial carbon capture and sequestration technologies, which remain unproven and will not be ready for implementation for many years, promise only to sequester greenhouse gases that have yet to be released into the atmosphere. However, say the report’s authors, agricultural and other land use management practices are the only innovations available today to sequester greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere by pulling in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis to grow and sustain more plants.

Worldwatch believes that mobilizing agricultural carbon sequestration is an essential tool in the effort to reduce the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases to the 350 parts-per-million level that many scientists argue we must achieve to stem climate change.