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Speaking at last week’s COP22 global climate summit in Morocco, Proffesor Rogier Schulte presented figures showing that the greenhouse gas intensity of each unit of Irish-produced food was now 15% below its 2005 level – used as the reference for international targets. It is projected to be 25% below 2005 level by 2030.
Yet Ireland’s agricultural production is growing, and plans are to expand further under the FoodWise 2025 strategy. This means the volume of emissions from agriculture is now only marginally lower than in 2005, and is expected to remain flat until 2030.
“Half of the story is good news,” said Schulte, who was until recently Teagasc’s lead sustainability researcher. He is now senior scientist at the International Agricultural and Environmental Policy department of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one of the world’s most advanced research centres in the field of climate change. “The decoupling of economic growth from emissions is the good news. The other half of the story is that we’re not waiting for a flatline of emissions, we’re waiting for a reduction,” he said.
EU effort-sharing climate targets for Ireland impose a 20% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The effort-sharing regulation covers sectors such as transport and farming, which alone accounts for half of this category in Ireland. By 2030, proposed EU targets would go up to 30%. However, up to 5.6% may come from increased carbon storage in trees and farm soils.
“We can still continue to work on reducing the bad emissions, but we can also work on increasing the sequestration potential of the land. It gives us more tools in the toolbox,” said Schulte. This will need to be tailored to each type of soil, with organic content, drainage and forestry potential all playing a part in its potential to trap harmful CO2 gas.
Scientists researching these issues in Ireland have also identified a new type of carbon sink that was never detected before.
“In some soils, we found carbon that is very stable, that has been there for hundreds of thousands of years. We found that this soil, at deep layer levels, is still unsaturated,” Schulte said. Further research could lead to the discovery of land management techniques that store carbon in those soils, offsetting some of agriculture’s emissions.
Schulte and his colleagues have mapped this and other types of soils across Ireland according to their carbon sequestration potential. According to him, this could be used to target conservation efforts and agri-environmental schemes to the land most efficient at trapping greenhouse gases.
As climate obligations become more stringent following the global climate agreement signed last year in Paris, this could have a major influence on agricultural policy.
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