Intensive farming ‘massively slowed’ global warming
Posted on June 17, 2010
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Fertilisers, pesticides and hybrid high-yielding seeds saved the planet from an extra dose of global warming. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new analysis which finds that the intensification of farming through the green revolution has unjustly been blamed for speeding up global warming.
Steven Davis of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues calculated how much greenhouse gases would have been emitted over the past half-century if the green revolution had not happened.
The study included carbon dioxide and other gases such as methane emitted by rice paddies. It found that, overall, the intensification of farming helped keep the equivalent of 600 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere – roughly a third of all human greenhouse-gas emissions between 1850 and 2005.
The emissions were avoided because the green revolution boosted crop yields – for instance by promoting hybrid varieties that had higher yields, and through widespread distribution of pesticides and fertilisers. This meant that more food could be produced without having to slash vast quantities of forest to expand farmland.
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“This paper makes an impressive case that agricultural intensification was a key process allowing for increases in food supply while limiting the area required for food production,” says Helmut Haberl, who studies the effect of agriculture on global resources at Klagenfurt University in Vienna, Austria. “It shows that agricultural intensification can have positive environmental effects, along with its well-known downside.”
But Haberl cautions that the study fails to acknowledge other societal and environmental harm from intensification, such as the degradation of soil, loss of biodiversity, toxic effects of pesticides on farm workers and animal suffering.
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Can we ask the reseaarchers if they have any financial links to the chemical industry? Who financed the research?