Emissions from agriculture and their control potentials

Disclaimer The views and opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent the positions of IIASA or its collaborating and supporting organizations. The orientation and content of this report cannot be taken as indicating the position of the European Commission or its services. Summary This report reviews recent developments that are potentially relevant for the control of agricultural emissions of air pollutants such as ammonia and particulate matter in Europe. The principles of current methods and techniques of ammonia emission controls in agriculture have a sound scientific basis that is well proven in practice. No fundamentally new insights and fundamentally new techniques have emerged over the last decade. The known techniques have been applied at a much larger scale in an increasing number of countries, leading to a wider acceptance and becoming part of the good practice, and costs have declined through learning effects, economy of scale, and consideration of synergistic effects. For example, in several countries specialized contractors have taken over some of the activities (e.g., low-emission manure application), which has substantially reduced costs. More than 90% of all emissions to air of ammonia derive from the agriculture sector. A range of emission control options is now proven to be effective in practice in more and more countries. Many of these measures are cost-effective and have co-benefits for the farmers, especially when additional synergistic effects are considered. Modified animal feeding, covered slurry storages, low-emission manure and urea fertilizer application techniques are examples of such cost-effective means to cut ammonia emissions in many situations. In particular, modified animal feeding can decrease NH 3 emissions from all stages of the animal manure management chain, and, at the same time, decrease N 2 O emissions and odour. In practice, ammonia emission reduction efficiencies and costs of these measures are sensitive against the chosen reference system and depend on local factors, such as weather and soil conditions, differences in management practices and in the technical performances of abatement measures. In many countries, there is limited experience with low-emissions techniques, due to technical, economic and cultural barriers that prohibit their implementation. However, in several cases technological and institutional experience has been successfully transferred between countries, resulting in even higher cost efficiency than originally anticipated. While cost estimates of low-emission techniques remain uncertain for specific farms due to the inherent variability of important factors across farms, costs tend to be higher on small farms …