Abstract
Global scenario modelling for climate stabilization lacks national resolution, particularly for the agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) sector, impeding effective national climate policymaking. We generate 850 randomized scenarios of activity combinations for Ireland’s AFOLU sector in the year 2050 and evaluate associated greenhouse gas fluxes to the year 2100. Using a GWP100 ‘net-zero’ greenhouse gas definition, 146 scenarios achieve AFOLU climate neutrality and 38 contribute to national neutrality (a substantial AFOLU sink) by 2050. Just one scenario contributes to national climate neutrality to 2100, reflecting future declines in CO2 removals by new forests (excluding potential downstream mitigation). In the absence of technical solutions to dramatically reduce the emissions intensity of bovine production, national milk and beef output will need to be substantially curtailed to achieve net-zero emissions. Active CO2 removal on destocked land, via organic soil rewetting and ambitious afforestation, could moderate output declines in milk and beef production, reducing international carbon leakage risks.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
Authors can confirm that all relevant data are included in the paper and/ or its Supplementary Information.
Code availability
The exact version of the model used to produce the results used in this paper is archived on Zenodo37 and freely available for download.
References
IPCC: Summary for Policymakers. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (eds Masson-Delmotte, V. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021).
Adoption of the Paris Agreement FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1 (UNFCC, 2015); https://unfccc.int/files/meetings/paris_nov_2015/application/pdf/paris_agreement_english_.pdf
Smith, P. et al. in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change (eds Edenhofer, O. et al.) Ch. 11 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).
Clarke, L. K. et al. in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change (eds Edenhofer, O. et al.) Ch. 6 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).
Tavoni, M. et al. Post-2020 climate agreements in the major economies assessed in the light of global models. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 119–126 (2015).
Rogelj, J., Geden, O., Cowie, A. & Reisinger, A. Three ways to improve net-zero emissions targets. Nature 591, 365–368 (2021).
Duffy, C. et al. GOBLIN version 1.0: a land balance model to identify national agriculture and land use pathways to climate neutrality via backcasting. Geosci. Model Dev. 15, 2239–2264 (2022).
Climate Action Plan 2021 (Government of Ireland, 2021); https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/6223e-climate-action-plan-2021/#:~:text=TheClimateActionPlan2021,intheClimateAct2021
Duffy, P. et al. Ireland’s National Inventory Report 2021 (EPA, 2021); www.epa.ie
Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021 (Oireachtas, 2021).
Saunois, M. et al. The global methane budget 2000–2017. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 12, 1561–1623 (2020).
Günther, A. et al. Prompt rewetting of drained peatlands reduces climate warming despite methane emissions. Nat. Commun. 11, 1644 (2020).
Cain, M. et al. Improved calculation of warming-equivalent emissions for short-lived climate pollutants. NPJ Clim. Atmos. Sci. 2, 29 (2019).
Prudhomme, R., O’Donoghue, C., Ryan, M. & Styles, D. Defining national biogenic methane targets: implications for national food production and climate neutrality objectives. J. Environ. Manage. 295, 113058 (2021).
Searchinger, T. D. et al. A Pathway to Carbon Neutral Agriculture in Denmark (World Resources Institute, 2021); https://doi.org/10.46830/wrirpt.20.00006
Net Zero: The UK’s Contribution to Stopping Global Warming (Committee on Climate Change, 2019); www.theccc.org.uk/publications
McKay, M. D., Beckman, R. J. & Conover, W. J. A comparison of three methods for selecting values of input variables in the analysis of output from a computer code. Technometrics 42, 55–61 (2000).
Duffy, C., O’Donoghue, C., Ryan, M., Styles, D. & Spillane, C. Afforestation: replacing livestock emissions with carbon sequestration. J. Environ. Manage. 264, 110523 (2020).
Forster, E. J., Healey, J. R., Dymond, C. & Styles, D. Commercial afforestation can deliver effective climate change mitigation under multiple decarbonisation pathways. Nat. Commun. 12, 3831 (2021).
Khalil, M. I., Kiely, G., O’Brien, P. & Müller, C. Organic carbon stocks in agricultural soils in Ireland using combined empirical and GIS approaches. Geoderma 193–194, 222–235 (2013).
Madigan, A. P., Zimmermann, J., Krol, D. J., Williams, M. & Jones, M. B. Full Inversion Tillage (FIT) during pasture renewal as a potential management strategy for enhanced carbon sequestration and storage in Irish grassland soils. Sci. Total Environ. 805 (2022).
Rogelj, J. et al. Scenarios towards limiting global mean temperature increase below 1.5 °C. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 325–332 (2018).
Eory, V. et al. Marginal Abatement Cost Curve for Scottish Agriculture. (Univ. Edinburgh, 2021); https://doi.org/10.7488/era/755
Van Wesemael, D. et al. Reducing enteric methane emissions from dairy cattle: Two ways to supplement 3-nitrooxypropanol. J. Dairy Sci. 102, 1780–1787 (2019).
Lanigan, G. J. et al. An Analysis of Abatement Potential of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Irish Agriculture 2021–2030 (Teagasc, 2019); http://tinyurl.com/y3qcewvr
Ag Climatise—A Roadmap Towards Climate Neutrality (DAFM, 2020).
Kalus, K., Koziel, J. A. & Opaliński, S. A review of biochar properties and their utilization in crop agriculture and livestock production. Appl. Sci. 9 (2019).
Palansooriya, K. N. et al. Impacts of biochar application on upland agriculture: a review. J. Environ. Manage. 234, 52–64 (2019).
Uprety, D. C. et al. Technologies for Climate Change Mitigation—Agriculture Sector (UNEP, 2017).
Smith, L. G., Kirk, G. J. D., Jones, P. J. & Williams, A. G. The greenhouse gas impacts of converting food production in England and Wales to organic methods. Nat. Commun. 10, 4641 (2019).
Springmann, M. et al. Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits. Nature 562, 519–525 (2018).
IPCC 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (TFI, 2019); https://www.ipcc.ch/report/2019-refinement-to-the-2006-ipcc-guidelines-for-national-greenhouse-gas-inventories/
IPCC 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (eds Eggelston, S. et al.) (IGES, 2006).
Hiraishi, T. et al. 2013 Supplement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories: Wetlands (IPCC, 2014).
Knaggs, G. & O’Driscoll, E. Woodflow and Forest-Based Biomass Energy Use on the Island of Ireland (2018) (Coford, 2019); http://www.coford.ie
Dillon, E., Donnellan, T., Moran, B. & Lennon, J. Teagasc National Farm Survey 2020 (Teagasc, 2021).
Duffy, C., Pruhomme, R., Duffy, B. & Styles, D. General overview for a backcasting approach of livestock intensification (GOBLIN). Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5047230 (2021).
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Environmental Protection Agency (Ireland) (EPA 2018-CCRP-MS.57). Thank you to the James Hutton Institute, National University of Ireland Galway, University of Limerick and Teagasc for the facilitation of this research. The James Hutton Institute is supported by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS), a division of the Scottish Government.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
C.D. conducted design, development, analysis, testing and validation and manuscript preparation. R.P. conducted design, development, analysis and validation. B.D. conducted design and development. J.G. conducted validation, review and editing. C.O. conducted validation, review and editing. P.P.M.I. conducted validation, reviewing and editing. M.R. conducted validation, review and editing. D.S. conducted design, development, analysis, review and editing.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Sustainability thanks James Glynn, Aaron Simmons and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Fig. 1.
Supplementary Data 1
Original scenario generation for modelling sample.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Duffy, C., Prudhomme, R., Duffy, B. et al. Randomized national land management strategies for net-zero emissions. Nat Sustain 5, 973–980 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00946-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00946-0
This article is cited by
-
Defining national net zero goals is critical for food and land use policy
Communications Earth & Environment (2024)
-
Pathways analysis to reducing aircraft emissions for China-Foreign routes
npj Climate Action (2023)