Mitigation potential

By generating and sharing greenhouse gas data, the MICCA Programme contributes to an improved understanding of the potential for greenhouse gas emissions and removals from the agriculture, forestry and other land use changes (AFOLU) sector.  MICCA’s work in this area will:

• help to identify economically viable and sustainable practices and methods to mitigate climate change while increasing the resilience of agricultural systems;
• facilitate the integration of climate change mitigation into agricultural, forestry and land management policies and practices; and
• point the way to rational investments in improved technologies and agricultural practices.

Marginal Abatement Cost Curves

The MICCA Programme is seeking to identify the most economical practices for reducing greenhouse emissions from agriculture at the global and regional level, as well as by commodity. The Programme’s research on cost-effective greenhouse gas abatement options for agriculture focuses primarily on practices with a large potential to enhance carbon stocks in soils and above ground. Examples of such practices, include reducing tillage, retaining crop residues, incorporating leguminous crops into crop rotations and integrating trees into farming systems. Until now, only limited attention has been devoted to these practices in global mitigation models. Improving these models is crucial, as they are necessary tools for understanding the policy and technical choices needed to move towards more climate-smart production systems.

Practices for enhancing soil carbon stocks are being assessed using DayCent, a biophysical model that simulates fluxes of carbon and nitrogen in the atmosphere, vegetation and soil. This modelling work is being conducted in collaboration with Colorado State University. The outputs from this biophysical model will be combined with economic information to develop a global set of Marginal Abatement Cost Curves (MACCs) for agriculture. MICCA team members are working together with the United States Environmental Protection Agency to link data on methane and nitrous oxide mitigation options with data on soil carbon sequestration.