Climate change impact

Efforts to increase crop production will take place under rapidly changing, often unpredictable, environmental and socio-economic conditions. One of the most crucial challenges is the need to adapt to climate change, which – through alterations in temperature, precipitation and pest incidence – will affect which crops can be grown and when, as well as their potential yields. In the near term, climate variability and extreme weather shocks are projected to increase, affecting all regions, with negative impacts on yield growth and food security. Agriculture (including deforestation) accounts for about one third of greenhouse gas emissions; for this reason it must contribute significantly to climate change mitigation. While crops can be adapted to changing environments, the need to reduce emissions will increasingly challenge conventional, resource-intensive agricultural systems.

Climate Change Impact from Agriculture

Agricultural activities, the cultivation of crops and livestock for food, contribute to emissions in a variety of ways:

Various management practices for agricultural soils can lead to production and emission of nitrous oxide, N2O. The large number of different activities that can contribute to N2O emissions from agricultural lands range from fertilizer application to methods of irrigation and tillage. Management of agricultural soils accounts for almost half of the emissions from the Agriculture sector.

Livestock, especially cattle, produce methane, CH4, as part of their digestion. This process is called enteric fermentation, and it represents one third of the emissions from the Agriculture sector.

The way in which manure from livestock is managed also contributes to CH4 and N2O emissions. Manure storage methods and the amount of exposure to oxygen and moisture can affect how these greenhouse gases are produced. Manure management accounts for about 15% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the Agriculture sector in the United States.

Smaller sources of emissions include rice cultivation, which produces CH4, and burning crop residues, which produce CH4 and N2O.

Emissions Mitigation from Agriculture

Future needs vs Resource degradation

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Agriculture Revolution and its consequences

It is also clear that current food production and distribution systems are failing to feed the world. Over the next 40 years, world food security will be threatened by a number of developments. Those changes in demand will drive the need for significant increases in production of all major food and feed crops. In most developing countries, there is little room for expansion of arable land. The declining quality of the land and water resources available for crop production has major implications for the future.

Resource degradation reduces the productivity of inputs, such as fertilizer and irrigation. In the coming years, intensification of crop production will be required increasingly in more marginal production areas with less reliable production conditions, including lower soil quality, more limited access to water, and less favourable climates.

Agriculture Revolution and its consequences

The history of agriculture can be seen as a long process of intensification, as society sought to meet its ever growing needs for food, feed and fibre by raising crop productivity. Over millennia, farmers selected for cultivation plants that were higher yielding and more resistant to drought and disease, built terraces to conserve soil and canals to distribute water to their fields, replaced simple hoes with oxen-drawn ploughs, and used animal manure as fertilizer and sulphur against pests.

It is now recognized that those enormous gains in agricultural production and productivity were often accompanied by negative effects on agriculture’s natural resource base, so serious that they jeopardize its productive potential in the future. “Negative externalities” of intensification include land degradation, salinization of irrigated areas, over-extraction of groundwater, the buildup of pest resistance and the erosion of biodiversity. Agriculture has also damaged the wider environment through, for example, deforestation, the emission of greenhouse gases and nitrate pollution of water bodies.

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Future needs vs Resource degradation