Transforming Agriculture from a Carbon Source

The food system is one of the planet’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, making reducing emissions from this sector a priority for policymakers around the world. IIASA researchers have explored the potential of carbon sequestration on agricultural land to combat climate change, offering insight into the economic impacts as well as the potential for climate change mitigation.

Carbon sequestration on agricultural land refers to the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere into soil and plants on farms. According to the authors of a new IIASA study published in Nature’s foodThese practices have enormous potential to reduce global warming while also reducing the costs of mitigating climate change across the economy.

“We set out to assess new options for carbon sequestration on agricultural land and their dynamics in an economic model. To date, these options have only been assessed in bottom-up engineering studies and have therefore not been considered in the Integrated Assessment Model-based climate stabilization pathways that underpin the futures chapters in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports,” explains lead author Stefan Frank, Senior Researcher in the Integrated Biosphere Futures Research Group within IIASA’s Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program. “Given the interconnections between mitigation options, economic sectors and world regions, integrated economic assessments such as ours can provide valuable insights into the system-wide effects of these options.”

To help absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the soil or plants on their farms, farmers can, for example, use techniques such as planting cover crops, using biochar (a type of charcoal made from organic waste), or practicing agroforestry (planting trees alongside crops or pastures), thereby turning their farmland into a carbon sink.

But why does it matter? The study suggests that by 2050, these agricultural practices could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as planting new forests, especially in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and South America. Sequestering carbon on farmland is not only important for climate change mitigation efforts, it could also increase agricultural productivity and climate resilience, and help the agriculture, forestry and land-use sectors achieve net-zero global emissions by 2050 at costs of $80 to $120 per ton of CO₂ equivalent.

“These actions would not only lower the overall economy-wide costs of abatement compared to a 1.5°C scenario without carbon sequestration practices in agriculture, but would also reduce losses in global economic output by 0.6% by mid-century under a climate stabilization scenario that aims to limit warming to 1.5°C,” notes study co-author Andrey Lessa Derci Augustynczik, a researcher in the same program at IIASA. “In addition, farmers could gain significant revenues from these actions—up to $235 billion by 2050—if they were given financial incentives for each additional ton of CO₂ stored in soil and biomass at an expected greenhouse gas price of $160 per tonne of CO₂ “equivalent in 2050”.

The authors emphasize that implementing these changes will require strong institutions and monitoring systems around the world to ensure that farmers properly implement these practices and are fairly compensated for their efforts.

“Despite the large mitigation potential at relatively low costs, agricultural carbon sequestration potentials are mainly located in the Global South, which requires caution as there are many structural, institutional or social barriers. To unlock these potentials and ensure a significant contribution to ambitious climate stabilization efforts, highly efficient institutions and monitoring systems need to be implemented in the short term, and the necessary policy incentives need to be implemented quickly,” Frank concludes.

Reference
Frank, S., Lessa Derci Augustynczik, A., Havlík, P., Boere, E., Ermolieva, T., Fricko, O., Di Fulvio, F., Gusti, M., Krisztin, T., Lauri, P., Palazzo, A., Wögerer, M. (2024). Increasing carbon sinks in agriculture benefits farmers and the climate. Nature’s food DOI: 10.1038/s43016-024-01039-1

More information
Read the accompanying research review here.

About IIASA:
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international research institute that conducts research on critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological and social change that we face in the 21st century. Our findings provide policymakers with valuable options to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. www.iiasa.ac.at

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