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July 08, 2023
By Kevin Killough
Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating
target, research shows
Better farming techniques across the world could lead
to storage of 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year.
![](images/images_07_14_2023/TractorSoil%20copy.jpg)
Wayne Hutchinson/Farm Images/Universal Images
Group via Getty Images
This story was originally
published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the
Climate Desk collaboration.
Marginal improvements to agricultural soils around the world would
store enough carbon to keep the world within 1.5C of global heating,
new research suggests.
Farming techniques that improve long-term fertility and yields can
also help to store more carbon in soils but are often ignored in favor
of intensive techniques using large amounts of artificial fertilizer,
much of it wasted, that can increase greenhouse gas emissions.
Using better farming techniques to store 1 percent more carbon in
about half of the world’s agricultural soils would be enough to absorb
about 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year, according to new data.
That amount is not far off the 32 gigaton gap between current planned
emissions reduction globally per year and the amount of carbon that
must be cut by 2030 to stay within 1.5C.
The estimates were carried out by Jacqueline McGlade, the former chief
scientist at the UN environment program and former executive director
of the European Environment Agency. She found that storing more carbon
in the top 30 centimeters of agricultural soils would be feasible in
many regions where soils are currently degraded.
McGlade now leads a commercial organization that sells soil data to
farmers. Downforce Technologies uses publicly available global data,
satellite images, and lidar to assess in detail how much carbon is
stored in soils, which can now be done down to the level of individual
fields.
“Outside the farming sector, people do not understand how important
soils are to the climate,” said McGlade. “Changing farming could make
soils carbon negative, making them absorb carbon, and reducing the
cost of farming.”
She said farmers could face a short-term cost while they changed their
methods, away from the overuse of artificial fertilizer, but after a
transition period of two to three years their yields would improve and
their soils would be much healthier.
She estimated it would cost about $1 million to restore 40,000
hectares (99,000 acres) of what is currently badly degraded farmland
in Kenya, an area that is home to about 300,000 people.
Downforce data could also allow farmers to sell carbon credits based
on how much additional carbon dioxide their fields are absorbing. Soil
has long been known to be one of Earth’s biggest stores of carbon, but
until now it has not been possible to examine in detail how much
carbon soils in particular areas are locking up and how much they are
emitting. About 40 percent of the world’s farmland is now degraded,
according to UN estimates.
Carbon dioxide removal, the name given to a suite of technologies and
techniques that increase the uptake of carbon dioxide from the air and
sequester the carbon in some form, is an increasing area of interest,
as the world slips closer to the critical threshold of 1.5C of global
heating above pre-industrial levels.
Arable farmers could sequester more carbon within their soils by
changing their crop rotation, planting cover crops such as clover, or
using direct drilling, which allows crops to be planted without the
need for ploughing. Livestock farmers could improve their soils by
growing more native grasses.
Hedgerows also help to sequester carbon in the soil, because they have
large underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that can
extend meters into the field. Farmers have spent decades removing
hedgerows to make intensive farming easier, but restoring them, and
maintaining existing hedgerows, would improve biodiversity, reduce the
erosion of topsoil, and help to stop harmful agricultural runoff,
which is a key polluter of rivers.
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