The Coalition on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases is a group of agricultural producers, scientists, methodology experts, carbon investors and project proponents that is fostering a fact-based discourse on the development and adoption of methodologies and protocols for GHG emission reductions and carbon sequestration associated with agriculture.
The agricultural sector has significant potential to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store, or “sequester” carbon and to reduce GHG emissions, in many cases at relatively low costs. With proper policies, the agricultural sector, which currently emits an estimated 7% of annual U.S. GHG emissions, can play a significant role in meeting the United States’ goal of achieving an 80% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050. In so doing, agricultural climate policy can also make an important contribution to the sustainable incomes of farming communities in the face of climate change.
The agricultural sector has a pivotal role to play in mitigating and helping to adapt to climate change, yet has been largely neglected by climate policy to date. The reasons underlying both the importance of agriculture to climate mitigation and the challenge of integrating it into policy solutions are several. First, agriculture is dependent on many diverse biological processes and a great number of equally diverse actors in managed landscapes, necessitating a complex and interlinked framework of programs and activities to reduce, sequester or avoid GHG emissions in a quantifiable manner. Second, programs and activities in the agricultural sector must address the issue that carbon that is sequestered in soils and biomass is at risk of reversal. Third, GHG emissions from agricultural activities are dispersed and often hard to measure. Thus, careful consideration must be given in designing appropriate federal, state, and regional climate policies for agriculture to balance these complexities and create a program that enables broad sector participation while maintaining environmental integrity.
In April 2010, the Coalition on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases issued a report surveying the landscape of GHG emissions reduction and carbon sequestration opportunities across the agricultural sector. As the discussion evolves, C-AGG seeks to be a scientific, fact-based, stakeholder driven discussion forum for:
Identifying key research, data, or modeling needs that must be addressed in order to develop sound protocols;
Prioritizing potential agricultural GHG protocols, based on considerations of technical feasibility, emissions reductions, and project developer interest and recommending their development and adoption by relevant standard-setting bodies, registries and agencies; and
Creating a series of methodologies, or perhaps modules, for agricultural GHG projects and encouraging their adoption by the appropriate agencies.
C-AGG would like to acknowledge the
generous support of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,
which makes our work possible.
