Nairobi: Environmental conservation and management experts from the Nairobi-based World Agro-forestry Centre (ICRAF) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are calling for a worldwide adoption of sustainable farming practices to mitigate the perils of climate change. The call was made here Monday at the launch of the 2nd World Congress of Agro-forestry, which will be held in Nairobi 23-28 August 2009.
Agriculture, deforestation and other forms of land use account for nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and with only months to go until the crucial UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, agricultural and environmental experts agree that all forms of land use should be included in a post-Kyo to climate regime.
According to UNEP, the agricultural sector could be largely carbon neutral by 2030 and produce enough food for a population estimated to grow to nine billion by 2050 if proven methods aimed at reducing emissions from agriculture were widely adopted today. Key among these methods are agro-forestry, reduced cultivation of the soil and the use of natural nutrients such as fertilizer trees.
A study by scientists from the ICRAF, for example, on fertilizer trees that capture nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil indicates that their use can reduce the need for commercial nitrogen fertilizers by up to 75 per cent while doubling or tripling crop yields. "These results should make agro-forestry appealing to farmers" noted Dennis Garrity, Director General of ICRAF.
UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner agreed, saying: ''If implemented over the next fifty years, agro-forestry could result in 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere, about a third of the world's total carbon reduction challenge.''
Researchers suggest that integrating agro-forestry in farming systems on a massive scale would create a vital carbon bank. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates no less than a billion hectares of developing country farmland is suitable for conversion to carbon agro-forestry projects.
According to a UNEP report released in June this year, the farm sector has the largest readily achievable gains in carbon storage, if best management practices were widely adopted. Up to 6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 equivalent, or up to 2 Gt of carbon, could be sequestered each year by 2030, which is comparable to the current emissions from agriculture. Many of the agricultural practices that store more carbon can be implemented at little or no cost. The majority of this potential - 70 per cent - can be realised in developing countries. While farmers in developing countries are one of the world's largest, most efficient producers of sequestered carbon, to date it has not been possible to calculate or verify how much they are removing from the atmosphere.
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