More efforts to improve land management are needed to meet Paris Agreement goals

The Paris Agreement set a very ambitious goal of limiting the average global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is going to be extremely hard to do and we have to make a lot of changes to our industry, transport and agriculture. Now an international research team led by scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany showed that land management has to be reworked for these goals to be even remotely possible.

Land management is very damaging to the climate. Many countries are still suffering from deforestation, green areas are disappearing from cities, and large homogenous fields are taking over farm fields. Scientists say that efforts to improve land management need to be taken to a new level in order to meet global climate change targets. Researchers say that the goals set in The Paris Agreement heavily rely on changing how farm land and forests are managed. In fact, many countries are already making some significant efforts, but they may not be enough.

Many countries are trying to increase forest areas to absorb more CO2. Meanwhile others are trying to reduce deforestation and establish more protected areas. This would result in more CO2 taken out of the atmosphere, but CO2 emissions have to be cut as well. Agriculture produces a lot of CO2, which is difficult to manage. If agriculture could become a bit more environmentally friendly and Paris Agreement countries would improve their forest management, up to one quarter of the greenhouse gases released through human activity every year would be removed. However, such changes take decades to come into full effect.

While in the developed world we are making progress in our efforts to prevent deforestation, tropical forests are still declining. Attempts at stopping this dangerous process are being made, but it is a tricky situation. Forest managing improvements so far had limited success and some laws in such countries like Brazil were recently rolled back. Dr Peter Alexander, one of the authors of the paper, said: “Individual countries’ plans to meet the Paris Agreement targets are vague, almost certainly insufficient and unlikely to be implemented in full. We need to find rapid but realistic ways of changing human land use if we are to meet our climate change goals”.

The Paris Agreement goals are very ambitious. In fact, they may be too ambitious – it is difficult to imagine how we would reach them. However, we should view them as a challenge and do everything in our power to improve the situation of climate change.

Source: University of Edinburgh