Agriculture

The Coalition’s Agriculture Initiative works to advance methane and black carbon abatement and recovery practices within the sector. In addition to helping reduce the rate of near-term warming, these practices can provide immediate co-benefits for public health, food security and economic development, aligning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and low-emissions agricultural development.

Tackling agricultural methane and black carbon emissions is an important objective for many countries, and many of the solutions advanced by the Coalition’s 11 initiatives will lead to increased agricultural productivity and contribute to the implementation of countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

The Agriculture Initiative focuses its activities on the four largest emission sources in the sector:

• Enteric fermentation: Methane expelled from livestock such as cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, etc., as natural part of the digestive process -- responsible for close to 30% of global anthropogenic methane emissions
• Paddy rice production: Methane emissions from the anaerobic decay of organic material in continuously flooded rice paddies -- responsible for 10% of global anthropogenic methane emissions
• Livestock and manure management: Methane emissions from the storage of (especially liquid) manure -- responsible for 4% of global anthropogenic methane emissions; and 40% black carbon emissions from the burning of dung as heating and cooking fuel
• Open burning of agricultural crops: The single largest source of black carbon emissions globally -- responsible for over a third of all emissions, with agricultural fires comprising 10-20% of all open fires