Review of trade-offs and co-benefits from greenhouse gas mitigation measures in agricultural production

Abstract

Anthropogenic release of greenhouse gasses (GHG) has increased in the last 50 years, contributing to global climate change. Because agriculture is one of the major contributors to the production of non-CO2 GHG, the opportunities for mitigating GHG emissions from agriculture are often considered by policy makers. However, the implementation of agricultural GHG mitigation policies can have unintended consequences or trade-offs (both negative and positive). A major problem, for policy makers, is that although most of these trade-offs have been described in the past, no overview of them exists; and in many cases, there is no consensus with regard to the impact of the mitigation measures on aspects such as cost effectiveness, social acceptance, environmental impact, etc. The current article gives an overview of the different kinds of trade-off that might occur and their relationships to GHG mitigation and agricultural production. The authors offer policy makers a framework which can be applied to any GHG mitigation measure to determine which trade-offs are the most important and which ones should be taken into consideration. This will help policy makers to create an optimal agricultural GHG mitigation measure.