Greenhouse Gas Mitigation through Agriculture

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be reduced or atmospheric GHGs sequestered to help reduce the future extent of climate change. Options to do this through agriculture have received increasing attention during the last decade. Some see agriculture as a potential low-cost provider of emission reductions in the near future with additional environmental and income distributional cobenefits. Others express concerns about agricultural mitigation efforts because of possible emission leakage and other environmental drawbacks. This article will not and cannot cover what is known about the whole gamut of the topic. Instead, it draws heavily on our experience and our role in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on agriculture and mitigation (Smith et al. 2007). We focus on responses in the domain of technologies, economics, and subsequent impacts of agricultural mitigation covering mitigation strategies, mitigation potential, and possible externalities.