emissions

A climate change risk assessment must consider at least three areas: the future pathway of global emissions; the direct risks arising from the climate’s response to those emissions; and the risks arising from the interaction of climate change with complex human systems. Each of these areas contains large uncertainties. From our assessment, we draw the following conclusions about the most significant risks.

Recent research and policy on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Brazil suggests
that the least-cost, largest-scale mitigation option is for cattle ranchers to produce more on the
land they already use. The rationale is that cattle ranching intensification programs (CRIPs)
can speed yield-increasing technology adoption that delivers GHG benefits by sparing land to
prevent deforestation and allow the production of more biofuels and other agricultural
products.

Evidence strongly suggests that climate change mitigation in agriculture is feasible and can be significant at large scales. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agricultural emissions can be managed by: (1) reducing emissions from methane and nitrous oxide, (2) greenhouse gas removals from the
atmosphere through carbon sequestration, and (3) avoiding or displacing emissions, e.g. by maintaining existing biomass or soil carbon, or
increasing energy efficiency. This policy brief proposes six areas where action is needed.

Optimizing a three-way pact comprising crop yields, fertility inputs and greenhouse gases may minimize the contribution of croplands to global warming. Fluxes of N2O, CO2 and CH4 from soil were measured under maize (Zea mays L.) grown using 0, 60 and 120 kg N hm-2 as NH4NO3-N and composted manure-N in three seasons on clay (Chromic luvisol) and sandy loam (Haplic lixisol) soils in Zimbabwe. The fluxes were measured using the static chamber methodology involving gas chromatography for ample air analysis.

This paper reviews the state of current scientific knowledge on the links between climate change, agriculture and food security, in terms of anticipating impacts, managing climate variability and risks, accelerating adaptation to progressive
climate change, and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector.

Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in
Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is
threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber
plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify
almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are
perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration.

The main question behind the work presented here is: How can agricultural greenhouse gas emissions be reduced or sequestration enhanced while maintaining and even increasing food
supply. To address this question, we first estimated the business-as-usual emissions of
greenhouse gases from the agricultural sector using the IPCC framework and land cover
datasets based satellite imagery for the base year 2006 for four East African countries - Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and five West African countries - Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Niger, and Senegal.

A multi-stakeholder forum has successfully used information sharing and collaborative
learning to accelerate progress and bridge differences in policy and implementation
approaches related to agricultural greenhouse gas mitigation opportunities. The Coalition on
Agricultural Greenhouse Gases (C-AGG) is an open-tent umbrella initiative focused on
developing agreement to promote progressive policies to incentivize GHG emissions
reductions from the agricultural sector. C-AGG spawned the formation of two related
initiatives Ÿ??

This policy brief summarizes key findings from the
report, ???Linking forests and food production in the
REDD+ context.??