Abstract
U.S. forests and agriculture present unique opportunities to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. U.S. forests currently remove a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year and store it as a terrestrial carbon sink, a trend that is projected to continue, although at a decreasing rate over time. Agriculture is and will continue to be a net source of GHGs. To encourage additional mitigation, analyses suggest addressing forest loss, forest aging, wildfire, and encouraging greater forest growth. In agriculture, analyses suggest addressing animal operation methane emissions and nitrous oxide from fertilizer use. Absent new targeted policies to encourage mitigation practices such as these, existing programs may need to be better leveraged for GHG mitigation, even if that is not their explicit objective. Leveraging existing programs requires coordinated outreach efforts to ensure that practices are not cross-purposed. Development of standards and verification practices is also necessary to ensure desirable outcomes. Finally, greater mitigation may be possible by maximizing the effectiveness of voluntary efforts from private and non-governmental organizations, and not necessarily the implementation of new policies. This conclusion represents a departure from traditional commentary on the subject, but arguably represents a more realistic path forward to achieving climate mitigation objectives in the near-term.
Highlights
We review the policy or market instruments capable of facilitating mitigation in the agriculture and forest sectors
We briefly discuss the likelihood of new policy or market development in the near future, concluding with a brief discussion on the most likely path or paths for achieving greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation in
Though carbon sequestration was projected to increase in agricultural land and wetlands, the region-wide decline in carbon sequestration rate is largely attributable to forest aging and an associated decline in the rate of forest carbon storage [10]
Summary
Policymakers and researchers typically group the agriculture and forest sectors together because land is the primary factor of production. An analysis of the GHG mitigation potential in these lands necessarily begins with an assessment of baseline trends and forecasts. Several such analyses have been conducted for U.S forest and agricultural land in recent years. Notable among these are assessments conducted by the U.S Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S Geological Survey, and the U.S Forest Service in fulfillment of domestic or international policy obligations. Differences in study scope, methodology, and primary assumptions make it difficult to directly compare the results between studies, but the studies contribute to a general understanding of the direction and magnitude of carbon sequestration and GHG emissions in the coming decades
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