Defra scientist offers climate solutions for UK agriculture
The UK’s chief scientist has suggested solutions to help UK agriculture reduce its environmental impact and meet its net-zero carbon targets.
Professor Gideon Henderson, chief scientific adviser at Defra, laid out the climate challenge for agriculture (see panel) while addressing a Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum policy conference online this week.
“We need to free up land for trees and biomass. We need to get off some of our peat and re-wet it, and we need to decrease the emissions that we have from our meat production sector,” he stressed.
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First, Prof Henderson identified protein consumption as an area to tackle. “We eat too much protein at the moment and we should change our diet,” he said. “We should think about alternatives – more peas, more beans.”
But he warned that if the UK halved its meat production and substituted this with imports from less sustainable producers, that would only lead to greater global emissions, “which is not helpful”.
Second, Prof Henderson said gene editing of crops could make them more resilient to climate change, lower pesticide and nutrient use and make land use more efficient.
Vertical farming
There was also “huge potential” for technological advances in agriculture, including vertical farming and soil-less farming, to increase healthy food production while simultaneously using less land and reducing carbon emissions.
“We need to look at wetland agriculture. Can we grow productive crops on re-wetted peatland? A novel area where there is a lot of current thinking and exciting work,” he added.
At the other end of the food chain, Prof Henderson said there was a need to change the way consumers made their food choices, including labelling of products to indicate their ecological and greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts.
Finally, minimising food waste would be necessary to address the over-production of food and the unnecessary emissions.
NFU net-zero ambition
Prof Henderson said the NFU’s plan for British farming to deliver net zero by 2040, and the work of many individual farmers, were “shining examples” of how the industry was working to reduce emissions.
But he noted that over the past decade, GHG emissions from agriculture had remained stable and the industry would collectively have to move much more quickly to reduce its emissions.
According to the latest Defra data, UK agriculture is responsible for about 10% of the country’s GHG emissions that cause climate change. Methane emissions from agriculture account for about 5.5% of the country’s total GHG emissions.
The UK government’s net-zero strategy has set an overall target for the country to reduce its GHG emissions by 78% by 2035.
Four areas UK agriculture must target to lower its carbon footprint
Prof Henderson identified four areas that UK agriculture and land use must focus on to reduce its carbon emissions:
- Increase forestation Government policy sets a target of 30,000ha of new forestry by 2024-25 and continued planting at least at that level until 2050 when an additional 3% of the UK land area is projected to be taken up by tree planting.
- Grow the biomass crop miscanthus The Committee for Climate Change (CCC) recommends planting a similar area to trees (3% of the UK land area). This has the potential to drive down emissions and displace fossil fuels from the system.
- Peatland Emissions from degrading peat, especially in lowland areas, must be addressed.
- Meat production Farmers will need to reduce emissions and land use from ruminant livestock, an area of active research and development at Defra and more widely.