EU farm greenhouse gases too high

LONDON, Monday

Greenhouse gas emissions from European livestock and fertilisers exceed carbon absorption by all the region’s trees and soils, underlining the need to cap farms’ contribution to climate change, a study showed yesterday.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, rich countries do not have to include agriculture in their national emissions targets. The world is meant to agree the outlines of a successor pact at a UN meeting next month in Copenhagen.

Trees and grasses

Plants including trees and grasses suck out of the air the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as they grow, in a “carbon sink” effect which helps to balance man-made emissions from burning fossil fuels. But European farms also add to climate change as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock and fertilisers.

Farming emissions wiped out the region’s entire carbon sink benefit from trees and plants, showed the first study putting those two land use numbers together.

“We were surprised about the magnitude,” of the net effect, said lead author Detlef Schulze, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, of the study published in Nature Geoscience. (Monday)