Co-benefits, trade-offs, barriers and policies for greenhouse gas mitigation in the agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) sector.
The agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) sector is responsible for approximately 25% of anthropogenic GHG emissions mainly from deforestation and agricultural emissions from livestock, soil and nutrient management. Mitigation from the sector is thus extremely important in meeting emission reduction targets. The sector offers a variety of cost-competitive mitigation options with most analyses indicating a decline in emissions largely due to decreasing deforestation rates. Sustainability criteria are needed to guide development and implementation of AFOLU mitigation measures with particular focus on multifunctional systems that allow the delivery of multiple services from land. It is striking that almost all of the positive and negative impacts, opportunities and barriers are context specific, precluding generic statements about which AFOLU mitigation measures have the greatest promise at a global scale. This finding underlines the importance of considering each mitigation strategy on a case-by-case basis, systemic effects when implementing mitigation options on the national scale, and suggests that policies need to be flexible enough to allow such assessments. National and international agricultural and forest (climate) policies have the potential to alter the opportunity costs of specific land uses in ways that increase opportunities or barriers for attaining climate change mitigation goals. Policies governing practices in agriculture and in forest conservation and management need to account for both effective mitigation and adaptation and can help to orient practices in agriculture and in forestry towards global sharing of innovative technologies for the efficient use of land resources. Different policy instruments, especially economic incentives and regulatory approaches, are currently being applied however, for its successful implementation it is critical to understand how land-use decisions are made and how new social, political and economic forces in the future will influence this process.
Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade de Brasília, I.B. C.P. 04457, Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro - UnB. D.F. CEP, Brasília, 70919-970, Brazil.
Mercedes
M
Bustamante
Carmenza
C
Robledo-Abad
Richard
R
Harper
Cheikh
C
Mbow
Nijavalli H
NH
Ravindranat
Frank
F
Sperling
Helmut
H
Haberl
Alexandre de Siqueira
Ade S
Pinto
Pete
P
Smith
D000383:Agriculture; D000818:Animals; D057231:Climate Change; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D016468:Forestry; D005740:Gases; D017752:Greenhouse Effect / Q000517:prevention & control; D058751:Livestock; D057766:Policy; D012987:Soil
D005740:Gases; D012987:Soil
AFOLU; GHG; agriculture; climate; ecosystem service; food security; forestry; mitigation