This review, published in Nature Climate Change, concludes that the role of no-till agriculture in mitigating climate change may be over-stated . No-till and reduced tillage are methods of establishing crops with low soil disturbance as opposed to conventional tillage involving ploughing or other practices.

Ten years after the first Year Book in this series appeared, a special e-book anniversary edition – UNEP Year Book 2014 – presents a fresh look at ten issues highlighted over the past decade.

This paper provides new predictions of the global climate change mitigation potential of soil organic carbon sequestration on agricultural land.  It asks whether soil carbon sequestration really does have  a major role to play in mitigating agricultural GHGs and concludes that, given the many technical constraints, and the time limited nature of sequestration, its contribution is in fact likely to be minor.  However, as the authors  point out, there are other non-CO2 benefits that arise from building soil carbon, that are not considered in this study.

Africa has been thought to be a potentially large carbon sink of great value in efforts to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. But this study reveals that it could be a net source of greenhouse gases that will increase global warming.

Scientists from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and University of California, Berkeley have demonstrated that plants and soils could release large amounts of carbon dioxide as global climate warms. This finding contrasts with the expectation that plants and soils will absorb carbon dioxide and is important because that additional carbon release from land surface could be a potent positive feedback that exacerbates climate warming.

This paper, produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), explores the opportunities for climate change mitigation in the agricultural sector through the use of carbon markets. Carbon markets have not yet brought the technical potential for agricultural mitigation to fruition due to constraints on both the demand and supply side in terms of limited market opportunities and constraints to project implementation.

FCRN member Dr. Adrian Muller co-authored a meta-analysis published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The authors looked at datasets from 74 studies from pairwise comparisons of organic vs. nonorganic farming systems to identify differences in soil organic carbon (SOC).