Possible pathways for low-GHG EU agriculture

Enabling agriculture to make a significant and proportionate contribution to the EU’s climate mitigation efforts will require the deployment of all the tools and options available to the sector to drive down GHG emissions and increase the absorption of carbon from the atmosphere.

It is only by implementing actions across both the production and consumption (supply and demand) sides that we can transform the way agricultural products are conceived in response to the climate challenge and how the sector can support climate action but clarity on what actions should be taken and by whom is required. It may therefore be necessary to develop an emission reduction hierarchy to guide and support actions across the agri-food sector following similar approaches taken towards waste and the EU’s circular economy transition, such as:

• Avoiding emissions where possible. Changing the types of commodities produced, reducing the consumption of livestock and other carbon-intensive products, and eliminating food waste;
• Reducing emissions where they cannot be avoided altogether. Increasing the resource-efficiency of production, lowering the per-unit GHG emissions of a commodity, producing seasonally and in the most optimal conditions in Europe, and reducing harvesting wastes;
• Recovery of emissions where possible. Increasing the sequestration potential on land to build carbon sequestration into standard production practices and ensuring its continued and permanent management on agricultural land. Developing circular-bioeconomies that recover post consumption and production nutrients, energy and materials as inputs to the sector, reducing the need for new inputs. Future agriculture must be different from that of today, sufficiently transformed to enable its contribution to the delivery of net-zero emissions, while providing adequate nutrition and other ecosystem services to an increasingly global society.

This report considers first what could be done to reduce emissions within agriculture, before looking at its potential to support other sectors in the economy or rely on other land-using sectors (e.g. forestry) to offset any emissions. It focuses indeed solely on agriculture’s contribution to the mitigation of climate change but there are a number of other dimensions that will need to be considered (trade-offs and co-benefits with climate adaptation and wider planetary boundaries as well as implications beyond EU borders.

The report is part of the Net-zero series, an initiative of the European Climate Foundation with contributions from a consortium of experts and organisations. It builds on a review of over 60 relevant scenarios from 18 different studies in order to understand how and to what extent emissions from agriculture can be reduced, and whether there is consensus in the existing literature. This was complemented through the use of the Carbon Transparency Initiative 2050 Roadmap Tool (CTI tool) to explore four illustrative scenarios to test the potential for efficiency improvements, changes in production volume and/or mix, as well as increasing carbon sequestration potential on farmed land. A stakeholder platform in the EU, and in France was used to test ideas around potential mitigation options.