Climate change mitigation opportunities and challenges
KfW Webinar, May 28 2020
Rethinking Agriculture for the
21st Century

Why mitigation in agriculture
and food systems?
1. Significant
• 9-14% of global emissions
• Agriculture contributes on average
30% of countries’ total emissions
2. Necessary
Reductions in other sectors will not
be enough to achieve 2 °C and 1.5
°C targets
3. Possible
Many practices are compatible with
SDGs, hence the possibility of “low-
emissions development”
Agriculture emissions, bycountry
Percent of nationalemissions from
agriculture
Richards et al. 2015

Agriculture is the next mitigation frontier
WRI, GHG emissions 2000
Land use
change
Energy
Agriculture

Contributes to agriculture’s massive and growing
environmental impact
• Half of the world’s habitable
land is used for agriculture, much
of which is on degraded soils
• 70% of global freshwater
withdrawals are for agriculture
• Livestock is a major
environmental polluter
• Agriculture and the food supply
chain are a major source
of greenhouse gas
emissions (21-37%)

Rethinking agriculture: Recent trends
• “The global food system is broken”
§ Is the cost of environmental damage is more than the value of food
produced? (Food and Land Use Coalition 2019)
• Calls to redirect US$700bn/yr in agricultural subsidies
§ Only 1% used for environment purposes
§ EU farmers have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer by
17% while yields rose
§ China is phasing out support for fertilizers
• Corporates seeking climate neutrality in supply chains to reduce
risk
• New policies: EU Green Deal and Sustainable Finance Taxonomy
§ Europe plans to be the first climate neutral continent by 2050

Global sources of agricultural emissions
Source: Carbon Disclosure Project. 2015. The Forgotten 10%. London: Carbon
Disclosure Project. Available from: www.cdp.net

Global sources of carbon sinks
Afforestation/
reforestation
29%
Agroforestry
1%
Wetland restoration
12%Forest mgmt
22%
Soil carbon
18%
Biochar
18%
Chart Title
A/R Agroforestry Wetland restoration Forest mgmt Soil C Biochar
9.9 – 26 GTCO2e

A mitigation target
Data source: Huppman et al. 2019
20% reduction needed in 2030 relative to 2020 to
meet the 2 °C target

Most agricultural emissions come from only a few
countries
Source: FAOSTAT 2020

Countries are planning action
104 countries included mitigation in agriculture in their
Nationally Determined Contribution
https://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/73255Richards 2018

• Paddy rice - alternate wetting and drying (AWD), residue and N mgmt
• Livestock systems - improving feeding, animal and herd management;
pasture management
• Cereal crops- building soil organic matter, e.g. through integrated soil
fertility management; nutrient efficiency through technologies such as urea
deep placement;
• Perennial crops- transitioning from annual crops or degraded land to
agroforestry, forestry or grassland
Low emission development options
• Avoided conversion of high carbon landscapes
(forests, peatlands, mangroves, grasslands)
• Reduced food loss and waste- storage, packaging,
waste recycling
• Supply chain energy use – fertilizer production, cooling,
transportation
• Dietary shifts- shift to low emissions food products, e.g.
beef to chicken

Water management in paddy rice:
Alternate wetting and drying
• Reduces CH4 emissions ~50% and water up to 30%.
• Also reduces water pumping costs, fossil fuel use, lodging and pests
• Issues: requires farmer control over irrigation, uneven incentives for
water-level management, increased weeding, N2O, difficult to verify
• Net revenue of $100-400/ha

Multiple practices contribute to mitigation
Reduced loss
http://ghgmitigation.irri.org/home
IRRI information hub: ghgmitigation.irri.org/

Slide courtesy of
K Nelson, IRRI

Slide courtesy of K Nelson, IRRI
2-10X rate of return if all benefits valued

Cost-Benefit Analysis on AWD in Mekong River Delta
Vietnam AWD

• Thai rice production accounts for
almost 60% of emissions from
agricultural activities (4th largest
emitter of GHGs from rice globally)
• 5-year NAMA project: low-emission
production; policy formulation and
supporting measures
• 100,000 farmers in 6 provinces
• GHG reduction of ~1 million tons of
CO2eq
• Thai Rice Dep. and MoNRE with
the consortium comprising GIZ,
IRRI-CCAFS and private sector
partners
Thai Rice NAMA support project
approved for ~ EUR 15 M funding

Livestock mitigation options
Potential GHG reductions as % of
baseline (FAO 2018)
LED practices vary by context
Issue: Emission intensity v. emissions
Resource: FAO Tackling climate change through
livestock www.fao.org/3/a-i3437e.pdf

Efficient use of nitrogen fertilizer
• Increase efficiency of N fertilizer uptake by
plants, e.g. timing, rates, deep placement,
microdosing, and good agronomy
• Increasing NUE from 19 to 75%, decreases
emissions intensity by 56%
• Issues: most smallholder farmers only use
small amounts of N, so absolute emissions
are likely to increase.
• Resource: Site-specific nutrient management
https://ccafs.cgiar.org/publications/site-specific-nutrient-management-
implementation-guidance-policymakers-and-investors#.W7ZgSC-ZPEY

Private drone companies scale out
technologies for better N management in
Mexico
• 3 drone companies delivering N
recommendations to farmers
using NDVI from their drones
and an algorithm developed by
CIMMYT and collaborators.
• Farmers are willing to pay for
this service (approx. 3 UDS /
ha per flight.
• N saving of ca. 60 – 70 kgN/ha
Slide courtesy of Ivan Ortiz-
Monasterio, CIMMYT

Getting the balance right
Source Campbell et al. 2019
• Set standards for optimal outcomes
• Monitor for negative impacts or create safeguards/no
go zones

Soil carbon sequestration in agriculture
• Agriculture is the major
driver of soil carbon
loss
• Yet soil C sequestration
has a technical potential
of 2 to 5 GtCO2 (Fuss et
al. 2018)
• An opportunity that
should be “neither
dismissed nor
exaggerated.” (Bossio et
al. 2020) Paustian et al. 2016
Resource: Global Soil Partnership
http://www.fao.org/global-soil-partnership/areas-of-
work/soil-organic-carbon/en/

Soil carbon issues
No guarantee that what you
add will stay
• Agriculture is a driver of
soil carbon loss
• Stability of storage
• Permanence and
saturation
• Slow gains, quick losses
You can’t easily tell how
much has been stored
• 3-5 years to see change
• Activity-based indicators
are poor
• Variability over space and
depth
Large-scale change is tough
(1) biophysical limits (water, nutrients, energy, exogenous inputs), (2)
GHG trade-offs, (3) climate change effects and (4) socio-economic
barriers (C price, need for ongoing incentives, slow policy change,
investment risk, land tenure etc), (5) context-specific solutions

Significant experience exists in large-scale
implementation of LED
• Review of 24 LED-relevant projects. Seven projects had ten or
more years of implementation experience, and eight other projects
had five or more years
o In China, 2.5 million households received payments for
restoring 2 million ha of land.
o In Nigeria, 2.5 million farmers used urea deep placement to
reduce fertilizer inputs by 25% and increase yields by 18-25%.
o Laser leveling in India reduced irrigation times on 500,000 ha,
raising yields by 7% and increasing profitability by USD 113-
175/ha/yr.
Wollenberg et al. 2019, TCAF/World Bank

Good practice features for transformational LED
project design
Principles Features of successful large-scale mitigation projects
Technology
transfer and
infrastructure
1. Strong value propositions for farmers beyond carbon payments
2. Farmer- and local government-driven decisions about practices
3. Effective technical change agents with capacity for large-scale outreach
4. Farmer access to integrated support services (on-line knowledge platforms for climate information services
and technical option feasibility and suitability analysis, ICT-based services, carbon accounting linked to project
activities, centers for input and service delivery)
Finance 1. Subsidy or credit used to catalyze new practices
2. Where offered, result-based carbon payments can create incentives for sustaining projects or incremental
improvements
3. Aggregated carbon payments to communities during times of low carbon prices to reduce transaction
costs and increase reward size
4. Public-private partnership, with public support to de-risk farmer transitions and private investment, and
private funds to drive scale
5. Low entry requirements for participation in enterprises or carbon schemes
6. Low transaction costs for finance delivery
MRV 1. Low-cost MRV methodologies specific to practices, e.g. use of existing statistics, such as fertilizer sales or
milk yields, remote sensing for agroforestry or AWD
2. Activity-based monitoring
3. Continuously improved modeling and science to verify activity data
4. Automated payments
Policy 1. National policy mandate for change in practices (not necessarily climate policy)
2. Inter-ministerial and administrative unit coordination, including between central and local government
Wollenberg et al. 2019, TCAF/World Bank

5/27/20 27
Landscape
transitions
Crop
transitions
Rice
crops
Crops
(non rice) Fertilizer Livestock
- 4.7M
TotalAnnualtCO2e
Landscape
and crop
transitions
Management practice
improvements
Increased
emissions
Reduced
emissions/
increased C
sequestration
(1,865,626)
(905,776)
(433,447)
(616,320)
(32,068)
(819,848
)
435,313
1,723,672
2.1 M
Mitigation benefits of USAID’s agricultural development portfolio
https://ccafs.cgiar.org/blog/greenhouse-gas-emission-analyses-nine-agricultural-development-projects-reveal-
mitigation#.WqrhAGbMzEY
25developmentprojects,15countries,3continents.

Rethinking agriculture
• Sustainable agriculture requires climate change mitigation
• To achieve 1.5 or 2°C targets, will require ambitious mitigation action
and rapid implementation
• Need special attention to LED options (innovation, incentives) and not
just a tweaking of traditional agronomy and policy
• Work on implementation at scale
§ Bring together the environmental, climate and food security agendas
§ Consider portfolios of interventions
§ Develop further evidence for feasibility at large scales (business models,
development programs with significant mitigation impacts, multiple projects
at scale).
§ Be bold