Agriculture is responsible for a significant proportion of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (perhaps 18% globally), and therefore has the potential to contribute to efforts to reduce emissions as a means of minimising the risk of dangerous climate change. The largest contributions to emissions are attributed to ruminant methane production and nitrous oxide from animal waste and fert...

Changing food consumption patterns and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been a matter of scientific debate for decades. The agricultural sector is one of the major GHG emitters and thus holds a large potential for climate change mitigation through optimal management and dietary changes. We assess this potential, project emissions, and investigate dietary patterns and their changes...

Executive summary This report estimates greenhouse gas emissions in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) for fleet vehicles, street lights, and traffic signals operated by the Town of Chapel Hill from 2005 to 2008, and makes policy recommendations for the future reduction of such emissions. The authors are undergraduates studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who have ...

Agriculture is a source for three primary greenhouse gases (GHGs): CO(2), CH(4), and N(2)O. It can also be a sink for CO(2) through C sequestration into biomass products and soil organic matter. We summarized the literature on GHG emissions and C sequestration, providing a perspective on how agriculture can reduce its GHG burden and how it can help to mitigate GHG emissions through conservation...

In 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that only 6.4% of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originated from agriculture. Of this amount, 53.5% comes from animal agriculture. Agricultural activities are the largest source of N2O emissions in the U.S. accounting for 69% of the total N2O emissions for 2009. In animal agriculture, the greatest contributor to methane emissions ...

Centuries of speculation about the causes of human stress on the environment is now being disciplined with empirical evidence, including analyses of differences in greenhouse-gas emissions across contemporary nation states. The cumulative results can provide useful guidance for both climate projections and for policy design. Growing human population and affluence clearly contribute to enhanced ...

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Equity is of fundamental concern in the quest for international cooperation to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations by the reduction of emissions. By modeling the carbon cycle, we estimate the global CO(2) emissions that would be required to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of CO(2) at levels ranging from 450 to 1,000 ppm. These are compared, on both an absolute and a per-capita basis...

There has been increased scrutiny in understanding the anthropogenic sources for methane emissions due to methane’s potency as a greenhouse gas [2]. There are two approaches for studying of methane emissions, emissions inventories (or ‘bottom up’ studies), and remote measurements of methane fluxes (or ‘top down’ studies). Emissions inventories calculate the leakage rates for fugitive methane ov...