A generalist species is a plant or animal species that is able to thrive in a large variety of environmental conditions, or that can live on a wide variety of foods. Members of the same generalist species can often be found at different parts of landscapes and in different regions of the world.

GHGs is an abbreviation for greenhouse gases. These include gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, which affect outgoing radiation, leading to global warming.

Global warming potential (GWP) refers to quantifying the strengths of different greenhouse gas emissions relative to carbon dioxide (CO₂). Derived from estimating the total change in atmospheric energy balance resulting from a pulse emission of the gas, relative to CO₂, over a specified time-frame (typically 100 years).

Green manures are fast-growing plants sown to cover bare soil, smothering weeds, and preventing soil erosion. They are dug into the ground whilst still green to add organic matter to the soil, slowly release nutrients for following crops and improve soil structure. Legumes (such as clover), which can perform biological nitrogen fixation, are often used as green manures to add nitrogen to the soil for following crops.

The Green Revolution was an agricultural modernisation programme in the 1950s and 1960s that promoted the widespread adoption of fertilisers and pesticides, agricultural machinery and higher-yielding varieties of maize, wheat and rice around the world, particularly in Latin America and Southeast Asia. It was led by the US government along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government, and was further promoted by development agencies, agronomists, and policy makers. Different reasons are attributed to its widespread promotion, including concerns about increasing food supplies to meet the demands of a growing global population, worries about rural unrest in the context of the Cold War, and a desire to expand farm input markets. The impacts of the Green Revolution are a topic of much debate. Proponents who seek a new 21st century Green Revolution highlight its role in increasing agricultural yields in Asia and Latin America; critics, on the other hand,emphasise that it did not effectively tackle hunger and malnutrition and that it resulted in environmental degradation, serious social inequalities and unhealthy dietary change. 

Greenwash or greenwashing describes when positive environmental claims are used misleadingly in public relations or advertising to divert attention from environmental impacts. It is often used in the context of identifying information hazards associated with particular environmental interventions or arguments. A low-impact intervention or an intervention that affects only one component of a larger system of impacts might be worth pursuing in the abstract, but have a net harmful effect by providing actors with excuses not to take more substantive action (or rhetorical distractions from their lack of more substantive action).

GWP* is an alternative application of Global Warming Potential to derive carbon dioxide equivalents (referred to as CO₂e* if using GWP*) that primarily relates the change in the rate of short-lived greenhouse gases (such as methane) to a fixed quantity of CO₂, rather than a direct equivalence between emissions of both short- and long-lived greenhouse gases, as is the case for conventional use of the 100-year Global Warming Potential.