Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a vital step in limiting climate change and meeting the goals outlined in the COP 21 Paris Agreement of 2015. Studies have suggested that agriculture accounts for around 11% of total greenhouse gas emissions and the industry has a significant role in meeting international and national climate change reduction objectives. However, there is currently little consensus on the mechanisms that regulate the production and assimilation of greenhouse gases in arable land and the practical factors that affect the process. Practical advice for farmers is often overly general, and models based on the amount of nitrogen fertiliser applied, for example, are used despite a lack of knowledge of how local conditions affect the process, such as the importance of humus content and soil types. Here, we propose a systematic map of the evidence relating to the impact on greenhouse gas flux from the agricultural management of arable land in temperate regions.
The effects of agricultural management on greenhouse gases have previously been reviewed by researchers, but so far there is no consensus as to how context (i.e. climate, fertiliser type and quantity, soil drainage, soil texture, and organic matter content) might affect greenhouse gas fluxes. This systematic map set out to catalogue and describe the evidence relating to the impacts of agricultural management activities on greenhouse gas fluxes. The synthesis allows the identification of knowledge gaps and knowledge clusters that can be researched further with novel primary research and full systematic reviews, respectively.
Our main question for this systematic map of research literature was:
What evidence exists on the impacts of within-field farmland management practices on the flux of greenhouse gases from arable cropland in temperate regions?
To find out about how we conducted our systematic mapping, click here.
The Farming4Climate project was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council to systematically map evidence of the impact of arable farming practices on GHG emissions. The project collates and describes the evidence base that investigates sources of heterogeneity across soils and climates. It was a collaboration between researchers from Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College, Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Centre for Evidence Based Agriculture at Harper Adams University, and the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation at Carleton University.
The project team consisted of: