Agricultural Sector GHG Mitigation & Ecosystem Services: Successes, Barriers and Needs.

Despite the failure of comprehensive US legislation to mandate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions in 2009, significant progress in agricultural sector GHG mitigation opportunities and approaches has been achieved in the US in the past decade.  Recent international attention and support for terrestrial mitigation solutions beyond forest-based opportunities are reinvigorating existing sectoral mitigation approaches and boosting incentive-based activities to voluntarily engage the agricultural sector in the fight against climate change.  It’s a natural fit, with significant bonus impacts for society:  agricultural activities that reduce GHG emissions tend to also deliver on-farm and off-farm improvements to air quality, water quality and/or quantity, biodiversity, habitat, and farmer livelihoods.  C-AGG’s multistakeholder forum has helped to achieve significant progress in market-based GHG mitigation efforts and the identification, development and promotion of programs, policies, and decision support systems necessary for successful approaches that can scale.  C-AGG has identified and is promoting a spectrum of natural resource and ecosystem services and sustainable solutions that the agricultural sector can deliver, and the programmatic infrastructure to support these solutions.  The author will describe trends in agricultural GHG mitigation, including landscape-based approaches that seek to capture net GHG and ecosystem service impacts; and will describe the spectrum of ecosystem services and solutions that the sector can deliver, the status of metrics and methodology development for each, as well as remaining barriers and high priority needs for success.