Tropical farming the climate-friendly way

Changing tropical farming methods could cut emissions of methane and carbon dioxide by up to 417 Mt of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2030, around 12% of livestock-related worldwide emissions of the greenhouse gases. That’s according to a team from Copenhagen and Kenya, who believe that the most likely levels of emissions cuts could be worth $1.3 bn a year.

“We should aim for fewer, better-fed, animals,” Philip Thornton of the Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Kenya, told environmentalresearchweb. “Apart from strategies to sequester greater amounts of carbon, all strategies for mitigating greenhouse gases appear to require the intensification of animal diets and a reduction in animal numbers to produce the same volume of meat and milk.”