Risk to rely on soil carbon sequestration to offset global ruminant emission

Yue Wang; Imke J.M. de Boer; U.  Martin Persson; Raimon  Ripoll-Bosch; Christel  Cederberg; Pierre Gerber; Pete Smith; Corina E. van Middelaar

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-43452-3

Risk to rely on soil carbon sequestration to offset global ruminant emission

Yue Wang^* (Corresponding Author), Imke J.M. de Boer, U. Martin Persson, Raimon Ripoll-Bosch, Christel Cederberg, Pierre Gerber, Pete Smith, Corina E. van Middelaar

^*Corresponding author for this work

Aberdeen Centre For Environmental Sustainability

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Carbon sequestration in grasslands has been proposed as an important means to offset greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant systems. To understand the potential and limitations of this strategy, we need to acknowledge that soil carbon sequestration is a time-limited benefit, and there are intrinsic differences between short- and long-lived greenhouse gases. Our analysis shows that one tonne of carbon sequestrated can offset radiative forcing of a continuous emission of 0.99 kg methane or 0.1 kg nitrous oxide per year over 100 years. About 135 gigatonnes of carbon is required to offset the continuous methane and nitrous oxide emissions from ruminant sector worldwide, nearly twice the current global carbon stock in managed grasslands. For various regions, grassland carbon stocks would need to increase by approximately 25% - 2,000%, indicating that solely relying on carbon sequestration in grasslands to offset warming effect of emissions from current ruminant systems is not feasible.

Original language	English
Article number	7625
Number of pages	9
Journal	Nature Communications
Volume	14
Issue number	1
Early online date	22 Nov 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43452-3
Publication status	Published - 22 Nov 2023

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements
We are sincerely grateful to Dominik Wisser (Animal Production and Health Division of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and Isabel Luotto (Global Soil Partnership of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) for providing data and offering advice to this work. We also thank Sino-Dutch Dairy Development Center of China Agricultural University and the China Scholarship Council (No. 201906350227) for the funding support. The views expressed in this document cannot be taken to reflect the official opinions of the supporting organizations.

Data Availability Statement

Data availability
The climate model used in this study is available from Zenodo at
https://zenodo.org/record/5957222. Methane emission factor from enteric fermentation and nitrous oxide emission factor from manure management of cattle are derived from the publicly available report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), i.e., 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories reports (https://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/2019rf/index.html). The online tool of MAGICC7
could be found via https://live.magicc.org/. Other data that support the plots in this paper andother findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on request.

Keywords

agriculture
Climate-change mitigation
Environmental impact

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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Cite this

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abstract = "Carbon sequestration in grasslands has been proposed as an important means to offset greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant systems. To understand the potential and limitations of this strategy, we need to acknowledge that soil carbon sequestration is a time-limited benefit, and there are intrinsic differences between short- and long-lived greenhouse gases. Our analysis shows that one tonne of carbon sequestrated can offset radiative forcing of a continuous emission of 0.99 kg methane or 0.1 kg nitrous oxide per year over 100 years. About 135 gigatonnes of carbon is required to offset the continuous methane and nitrous oxide emissions from ruminant sector worldwide, nearly twice the current global carbon stock in managed grasslands. For various regions, grassland carbon stocks would need to increase by approximately 25% - 2,000%, indicating that solely relying on carbon sequestration in grasslands to offset warming effect of emissions from current ruminant systems is not feasible.",

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N2 - Carbon sequestration in grasslands has been proposed as an important means to offset greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant systems. To understand the potential and limitations of this strategy, we need to acknowledge that soil carbon sequestration is a time-limited benefit, and there are intrinsic differences between short- and long-lived greenhouse gases. Our analysis shows that one tonne of carbon sequestrated can offset radiative forcing of a continuous emission of 0.99 kg methane or 0.1 kg nitrous oxide per year over 100 years. About 135 gigatonnes of carbon is required to offset the continuous methane and nitrous oxide emissions from ruminant sector worldwide, nearly twice the current global carbon stock in managed grasslands. For various regions, grassland carbon stocks would need to increase by approximately 25% - 2,000%, indicating that solely relying on carbon sequestration in grasslands to offset warming effect of emissions from current ruminant systems is not feasible.

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Risk to rely on soil carbon sequestration to offset global ruminant emission

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Data Availability Statement

Keywords

UN SDGs

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