The Soil Association has published a lengthy report (212 pages) arguing that action to increase soil carbon levels has major potential for mitigating agricultural GHG emissions, and that organic farming practices lead to higher sequestration than conventional approaches.
The paper recommends that:
- Soil carbon impacts should be fully accounted for and considered in climate policy and agricultural GHG accounting systems, in line with IPCC recommendations and including overseas impacts.
- National and global strategies for large-scale soil carbon sequestration should be adopted based on a major expansion and development of organic farming, with a parallel approach to improve non-organic farming.
- Work to define a sustainable diet (as is being championed by the Council of Food Policy Advisors and the Sustainable Development Commission) should take account of the importance of grass-fed livestock in conserving existing soil carbon stocks in permanent grasslands and sequestering carbon in cultivated land via temporary grass leys on mixed farms.
- The major national and global carbon source hot-spots should be also directly addressed. For the UK, this means drastically reducing imports of beef, soya and palm oil, reversing peatland drainage, and returning the cultivated fenlands (lowland peat soils) to rotational arable or grass ley farming.
Post a new comment »