Meeting Europe's climate change commitments: quantitative estimates of the potential for carbon mitigation by agriculture

作者：Pete Smith, D. S. Powlson, Jo Smith, Pete Falloon, K. Coleman · 发表于：Global Change Biology · 年份：2000 · DOI：10.1046/j.1365-2486.2000.00331.x · 被引用次数：377 · 研究领域：Bioenergy crop production and management、Forest Management and Policy、Climate Change Policy and Economics

Summary Under the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union is committed to a reduction in CO2 emissions to 92% of baseline (1990) levels during the first commitment period (2008–2012). The Kyoto Protocol allows carbon emissions to be offset by demonstrable removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Thus, land‐use/land‐management change and forestry activities that are shown to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels can be included in the Kyoto targets. These activities include afforestation, reforestation and deforestation (article 3.3 of the Kyoto Protocol) and the improved management of agricultural soils (article 3.4). In this paper, we estimate the carbon mitigation potential of various agricultural land‐management strategies and examine the consequences of European policy options on carbon mitigation potential, by examining combinations of changes in agricultural land‐use/land‐management. We show that no single land‐management change in isolation can mitigate all of the carbon needed to meet Europe's climate change commitments, but integrated combinations of land‐management strategies show considerable potential for carbon mitigation. Three of the combined scenarios, one of which is an optimal realistic scenario, are by themselves able to meet Europe's emission limitation or reduction commitments. Through combined land‐management scenarios, we show that the most important resource for carbon mitigation in agriculture is the surplus arable land. We conclude that in order to fully exploit th...