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Add to Preferred SourcesWays to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture under different climatic conditions have been identified, thanks to a research project coordinated by the IAEA, in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Using isotopic techniques, scientists from around the world have developed technology packages that countries can use in climate change mitigation efforts by making more efficient use of water and nutrients.
When farmers apply fertilizer to their crops, plants convert the fertilizer into the nutrients the plants need to flourish. Some of the by-products related to these processes are released as GHGs such as nitrous oxide (N2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), and the overuse of fertilizer is leading to the release of excessive amounts of GHGs. According to the FAO, agriculture, forestry and other land use make up close to a quarter of GHGs, and the use of synthetic fertilizers accounts for 12% of total agriculture GHG emissions.
These gases, in turn, trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, contributing to global warming and thereby altering the conditions under which food crops grow, affecting not only crop yields, but also food quality and food security.
“The release of large amounts of N2O is particularly worrying because it’s 300 times more powerful than CO2 in trapping heat, and 16 times more powerful than CH4,” said Mohammad Zaman, a soil scientist at the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture. “Increasing nitrogen efficiency in farming and stopping the escape of nitrogen from soil can therefore greatly contribute to climate change mitigation strategies.”
To optimize agricultural practices, scientists from 10 countries – Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Germany, Iran, Pakistan and Spain – along with experts from the IAEA and the FAO, used isotopic techniques to identify factors that influence GHG emissions from farmlands during a five-year period, which ended on July 2019. The experts used the stable isotopes nitrogen-15 and carbon-13 to identify sources of N2O and CO2 emission, as well as to study the accumulation of carbon and nitrogen under different land uses.
Original source: IAEA
Published on 06 August 2019