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Agricultural productivity and greenhouse gas emissions: Trade-offs or synergies between mitigation and food security?

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Title Agricultural productivity and greenhouse gas emissions: Trade-offs or synergies between mitigation and food security?
 
Creator Valin, Hugo
Havlík, Petr
Mosnier, Aline
Herrero, Mario T.
Schmid, Erwin
Obersteiner, Michael
 
Subject food security
agriculture
 
Description In this letter, we investigate the effects of crop yield and livestock feed efficiency scenarios on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture and land use change in developing countries. We analyze mitigation associated with different productivity pathways using the global partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM. Our results confirm that yield increase could mitigate some agriculture-related emissions growth over the next decades. Closing yield gaps by 50% for crops and 25% for livestock by 2050 would decrease agriculture and land use change emissions by 8% overall, and by 12% per calorie produced. However, the outcome is sensitive to the technological path and which factor benefits from productivity gains: sustainable land intensification would increase GHG savings by one-third when compared with a fertilizer intensive pathway. Reaching higher yield through total factor productivity gains would be more efficient on the food supply side but halve emissions savings due to a strong rebound effect on the demand side. Improvement in the crop or livestock sector would have different implications: crop yield increase would bring the largest food provision benefits, whereas livestock productivity gains would allow the greatest reductions in GHG emission. Combining productivity increases in the two sectors appears to be the most efficient way to exploit mitigation and food security co-benefits.
 
Date 2013-09-01
2013-07-31T16:42:27Z
2013-07-31T16:42:27Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Valin, H., Havlík, P., Mosnier, A., Herrero, M., Schmid, E. and Obersteiner, M. 2013. Agricultural productivity and greenhouse gas emissions: Trade-offs or synergies between mitigation and food security? Environmental Research Letters 8(3).
1748-9326
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/33423
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/035019
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0
Open Access
 
Publisher IOP Publishing
 
Source Environmental Research Letters