Tweaking agricultural practices could help store some 31 gigatons of greenhouse gasses per year and avoid surpassing the 1.5°C warming threshold, The Guardian writes, referencing new research by former chief scientist at the UN environment program Jacqueline McGlade. Increasing agricultural soil carbon-storage capacities by just 1% across half of global farming soils could help plug the 32 gigaton emissions gap between current CO2 slashing targets and the carbon volumes that must be cut by 2030 to remain within the 1.5°C warming limit, the news outlet notes.

Soil is a major natural carbon sink: The planet’s soils store some 2.5k gigatons of CO2, containing more carbon than all plant life, which is more than three times the volumes of CO2 in the atmosphere, according to research out of Columbia University,

How can we get soil to store even more carbon? The research suggests that a divestment from artificial fertilizer usage in the top 30 centimeters of about 50% global farming soils would improve crop yields and enhance soil carbon storage capacity.

Fertilizers aren’t helping with dangerous emissions: According to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, synthetic fertilizers have led to an uptick in greenhouse gas emissions in the last century. Ammonia fertilizers consume a lot of energy to be manufactured resulting in increased carbon dioxide emissions and crops only use approximately half of the nitrogen from fertilizers, with the rest broken down by microbes in the soil to release the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide back into the atmosphere.

By the numbers: According to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are projected to rise by 7.5% in the next decade, representing less than half of the projected output growth. This signals a major drop in the carbon intensity of agricultural production, it said. Livestock is set to account for 86% of the increased emissions over the decade.

A price tag with carbon credits: Restoring some 40k hectares of degraded soil in Kenya, for example, would cost some USD 1 mn, according to McGlade. While farmers would pay a pretty penny in the first two-three years of shifting away from over usage of fertilizers, the new technique’s enhanced carbon-storage capacity could turn their farmlands carbon-negative, enabling them to sell the CO2 their lands absorb in the form of carbon credits in the future.

The EU already has plans to push down pesticide and artificial fertilizer use: Last week, the EU proposed draft legislation to reduce restrictions on genetically-modified crops that would be climate-tolerant and consume fewer volumes of artificial fertilizers, Reutersreported.

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