Farming & agriculture

Farming in 2050: storing carbon could help meet Australia’s climate goals

Australia’s agricultural lands help to feed about 60 million people worldwide, and also support tens of thousands of farmers as well as rural communities and industries.

But a growing global population with a growing appetite is placing increasing demands on our agricultural land. At the same time, the climate is warming and in many places getting drier too.

Agriculture, and particularly livestock, is currently a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. But new markets and incentives could make storing carbon or producing energy from land more profitable than farming, and turn our agricultural land into a carbon sink.

How might these competing forces play out in changing Australian land use? Our research, published in Global Environmental Change, assesses a range of potential pathways for Australia’s agricultural land as part of CSIRO’s National Outlook…

 

Read the full article at: Farming in 2050: storing carbon could help meet Australia’s climate goals