{"id":4623,"date":"2025-06-02T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agroperemoga.com.ua\/?p=4623"},"modified":"2025-06-17T19:07:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T16:07:33","slug":"ohlyad-naukovykh-doslidzhen-ta-mizhnarodnykh-polityk-i-praktyk-yaki-seryozno-vplyvayut-na-zhyttyediyalnist-lyudyny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agroperemoga.com.ua\/en\/the-ohlyad-of-scientific-research-and-international-policy-and-practice-that-has-a-significant-impact-on-the-quality-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"\ud83d\udd34 REVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND INTERNATIONAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES THAT SERIOUSLY AFFECT HUMAN LIFE"},"content":{"rendered":"

New study shows that agriculture produces more greenhouse gas emissions than burning fossil fuels<\/p>\n\n\n\n


In March 2025, Environmental Research Letters published \"Increased Transparency in Accounting Conventions Could Benefit Climate Policy\". Its author, Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop, who worked as a chief scientist at the Department of Natural Resources of the Australian state of Queensland and now represents the World Wide Fund for Nature, points out methodological shortcomings in the UN-agreed rules for accounting for greenhouse gas emissions and removals, which are used by governments to determine the carbon footprint of the economy and set appropriate climate goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


In particular, GHG emissions from fossil energy, industry, and transport are reported in gross terms, i.e. all 100% are accounted for, while emissions from the LULUCF (land use, land-use change, and forestry) sector are reported with a coefficient of 0.33, i.e. only 33% are accounted for. The logic is that carbon cycling in nature has been going on for millions of years and its emissions and removals are mutually balanced, while carbon from fossil sources is \"new\" because it was lying underground before coal, oil or gas was extracted, not floating in the air as CO2. The shortcomings of this approach are obvious: first, the initial destruction of stable forest, savannah or steppe ecosystems to create agricultural land can also be considered as the formation of \"new\" carbon (the practice of deforestation in the period 1750-2020 has emitted more greenhouse gases than all other sectors combined); second, if carbon in the environment is balanced, why is the coefficient of 0.33 taken from the ceiling and not just zero used? Third, natural CO2 sinks (land and ocean) do not distinguish between carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere - generated by industry or agriculture. As a result, different accounting methods - gross for fossil fuels and net for agricultural production - give a distorted picture. Instead, it is proposed to apply a uniform and consistent method of measuring, reporting and verifying the carbon footprint (consistent carbon accounting) based on gross emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The second disadvantage of the currently accepted UN methodology is that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are accounted for using the \"global warming potential\" coefficient, which takes CO2 as 1 (unit), with which other GHGs are compared depending on the strength of their greenhouse effect, and the cumulative impact on global warming is considered over a time horizon of 20 to 100 years. The problem is that different greenhouse gases stay in the air for different lengths of time (from a few months to many centuries) and lose their potency over time by decomposing into other components, so the average \"global warming potential\" is actually underestimated in the short term. 30 years ago, when the GHG accounting methodology was first developed and climate change was not so acute, such errors were not significant. Instead, today the author of the new study recommends using the concept of \"effective radiative forcing\", when the effect of each greenhouse gas is calculated in the excess amount of watts of solar energy per 1 sq m of the Earth's troposphere. This method shows the greenhouse effect of different gases both over a certain historical period in the past and in real time today, rather than guessing how it might be in the distant future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The third drawback of the established methodology is that it does not take into account the effect of cooling gases released into the atmosphere along with greenhouse gases. We are talking mainly about sulphur oxides, which are massively present in emissions from fossil energy sources. The paradox is that they have a masking cooling effect that significantly compensates for the greenhouse effect; and today, when humanity cleans the sky of harmful sulphur-containing substances to improve its own lung health, this noble cause, unfortunately, automatically intensifies and accelerates global warming. Meanwhile agriculture<\/a> emits almost no cooling gases and at the same time produces the largest emissions of the greenhouse gas methane due to intensive industrial livestock farming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Finally, supporters of prioritising decarbonisation in industry rather than agriculture point out that proactive reforestation measures (reforestation + afforestation) also significantly offset CO2 emissions from agricultural production. Their opponents point out that these beneficial measures are neither part of nor the merit of agricultural production itself, and that reforestation offsets all emissions, not just those from agriculture. In addition, another recent study at the University of Oregon found that young trees in their first 20 years or so are net sources of CO2 emissions because their leaf surface area is not sufficient to allow daytime photosynthesis to dominate nighttime respiration and their roots are not sufficiently developed to fix any stable carbon in the soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


So, having corrected the above-mentioned shortcomings of the greenhouse gas accounting methodology and made new calculations, the study concluded that the contribution of agriculture to global warming is not 33% against 47% of the fossil fuel industry, as is currently officially believed, but 60% against 18%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


This unexpected result did not actually reveal anything new, but only changed the methodology of measurement and accounting, making it more objective. The study provoked both positive and critical reactions from fellow scientists. The critics' argument that the new methodology of one scientist contradicts the established methodology of hundreds of scientists from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and therefore cannot be true sounds solid. At the same time, these hundreds of UN scientists could not explain the officially recorded sharp acceleration of global warming over the past 2-3 years until a retired scientist (James Hansen) explained it to them and they admitted that he was right (UN reports do not take into account the so-called mutually reinforcing climate effects - feedback loops - or cooling gases, and their calculations of the sensitivity of the climate balance were significantly underestimated).
Conclusions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n