Combating Climate Change: Farming Out Global Warming Solutions

Changes to agricultural practice and forestry management could cut greenhouse gas emissions, buying time to develop alternative technologies.
NO TILL?: By avoiding tillage, seen here, farmers can both increase the quality of their soil and sequester greenhouse gases.Image: USDA

Saving the trees could slow climate change, new research shows. Each year, nearly 33 million acres of forestland around the world is cut down, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Tropical felling alone  contributes 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon—some 20 percent of all man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—to the atmosphere annually. If such losses were cut in half, it could save 500 million metric tons of carbon annually and contribute 12 percent of the total reductions in GHG emissions required to avoid unpleasant global warming, researchers recently reported in Science.

Forest depletion ultimately contributes more GHG emissions than all the cars and trucks in use worldwide, says Werner Kurz, a forest ecologist with Natural Resources Canada, who was not involved with the study. "What we are doing in these tropical forests is really a massive problem."

Changes in forest management and agricultural practices could significantly reduce the threat of global warming much more quickly than can technological solutions such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) from coal-fired power plants, according to experts. "We don't know how to do CCS. These are things we could do today," says Bruce McCarl, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "They are a bridge to the future."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=combating-climate-change-farming-forestry