Advancing agricultural greenhouse gas quantification\u3csup\u3e*\u3c/sup\u3e

Better information on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigation potential in the agricultural sector is necessary to manage these emissions and identify responses that are consistent with the food security and economic development priorities of countries. Critical activity data (what crops or livestock are managed in what way) are poor or lacking for many agricultural systems, especially in developing countries. In addition, the currently available methods for quantifying emissions and mitigation are often too expensive or complex or not sufficiently user friendly for widespread use

Synthesis and Review: Advancing agricultural greenhouse gas quantification

Reducing emissions of agricultural greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as methane and nitrous oxide, and sequestering carbon in the soil or in living biomass can help reduce the impact of agriculture on climate change while improving productivity and reducing resource use. There is an increasing demand for improved, low cost quantification of GHGs in agriculture, whether for national reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), underpinning and stimulating improved practices, establishing crediting mechanisms, or supporting green products. This ERL focus issue highlights GHG quantification to call attention to our existing knowledge and opportunities for further progress. In this article we synthesize the findings of 21 papers on the current state of global capability for agricultural GHG quantification and visions for its improvement. We conclude that strategic investment in quantification can lead to significant global improvement in agricultural GHG estimation in the near term

Synthesis and Review: Advancing agricultural greenhouse gas quantification

Reducing emissions of agricultural greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as methane and nitrous oxide, and sequestering carbon in the soil or in living biomass can help reduce the impact of agriculture on climate change while improving productivity and reducing resource use. There is an increasing demand for improved, low cost quantification of GHGs in agriculture, whether for national reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), underpinning and stimulating improved practices, establishing crediting mechanisms, or supporting green products. This ERL focus issue highlights GHG quantification to call attention to our existing knowledge and opportunities for further progress. In this article we synthesize the findings of 21 papers on the current state of global capability for agricultural GHG quantification and visions for its improvement. We conclude that strategic investment in quantification can lead to significant global improvement in agricultural GHG estimation in the near term

Ecosystem Services and U.S. Stormwater Planning: An Approach for Improving Urban Stormwater Decisions

Green stormwater infrastructure (GI) is gaining traction as a viable complement to traditional “gray” infrastructure in cities across the United States. As cities struggle with decisions to replace deteriorating stormwater infrastructure in the face of looming issues such as population growth and climate change, GI may offer a costeffective, efficient, and sustainable approach. However, decision makers confront challenges when integrating GI within city plans, including uncertainties around GI capacity and maintenance, resistance to collaboration across city governance, increasingly inflexible financing, accounting practices that do not incorporate the multiple values of GI, and difficulties in incorporating ecological infrastructure into stormwater management. This paper presents an ecosystem services framework for assessing the context-specific needs of decision makers, while considering the strengths and limitations of GI use in urban stormwater management. We describe multiple dimensions of the planning system, identify points of intervention, and illustrate two applications of our framework – Durham, North Carolina and Portland, Oregon (USA). In these case studies, we apply our ecosystem services framework to explicitly consider tradeoffs to assist planning professionals who are considering implementation of GI. We conclude by offering a research agenda that explores opportunities for further evaluations of GI design, implementation, and maintenance in cities

The Most Important Current Research Questions in Urban Ecosystem Services

We tend to take nature’s ecological systems – or ecosystems – for granted, but they provide critically valuable services to society and to urban areas. They create a sense of place and recreational opportunities, contributing to quality of life by enhancing human physical and psychological health. This is particularly true for cities, where economic productivity, fiscal soundness, community life, and governance are tied to natural surroundings in distinct, unique and generally under-appreciated ways. Because the urbanized world depends on ecosystem services – both inside and outside of city boundaries – investing in the provision of ecosystem services will often be more cost-effective than response actions, such as treatment, restoration, and disaster response. Given the importance of urban ecosystem benefits to surrounding populations, we might expect that ecosystem services would play a prominent role in the formulation of urban policies, plans, and laws. However, with rare exception, they do not. Many cities are experiencing declines of the ecosystems that sustain them. Metropolitan areas are losing open space, farmland, and environmentally sensitive lands. As America, and indeed the rest of the world, becomes increasingly urbanized, these issues are of the first importance in seeking to improve quality of life. The scholarship in the area, though, has been fragmented by discipline. Much remains to be done. First and foremost, we must identify the pressing research needs. This article brings together the collective insights of scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines – lawyers and urban planners to ecologists and economists. Taking a comprehensive and wide-ranging view of the field, we identify the most important research questions that should shape the future of scholarship on urban ecosystem services. In doing so, we seek to help shape the trajectory of research across multiple disciplines in this growing and critical area

Aligning evidence generation and use across health, development, and environment

Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) and serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible results chains, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified rubric. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice, streamlining efforts to apply multi-objective approaches and/or synthesize evidence in multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams. These recommendations advance the necessary process of reconciling existing evidence standards in health, development, and environment, and initiate a common basis for integrated evidence generation and use in research, practice, and policy design

Developing a State-Level Natural and Working Lands Climate Action Plan

Natural and working lands—forests, wetlands, coastal, and agricultural lands—provide many benefits, including supporting key economic sectors, enhancing community resilience to hazards such as fires and floods, and contributing to climate mitigation by storing large amounts of carbon. North Carolina recently completed a Natural and Working Lands Climate Action Plan with recommendations for conserving, restoring, and managing these lands to preserve and enhance their benefits. This guide, aimed at other states interested in developing similar action plans, walks through the planning process, helpful resources, and the tracking of plan implementation—using examples from North Carolina’s experience

Integrating Large-Scale Planning into Environmental Markets and Related Programs: Status and Trends

Building on earlier efforts, guidance from the federal government on mitigation for environmental impacts recommends the use of large-scale plans, preferably carried out in advance of impacts, to steer both development and mitigation. The idea is that advanced planning can improve site selection for proposed projects and increase the return on investment for mitigation while helping to provide greater predictability for project proponents, increase the efficiencies of project review, reduce permitting times, and support better environmental results. This paper explores progress in integrating large-scale, spatially explicit planning into environmental markets and programs in the United States. Through interviews with experts and review of the gray literature and government documents, it identifies examples of large-scale planning in these programs. It describes how the planning is guiding decisions about impact avoidance and compensatory mitigation, whether the planning is required or optional, and if the planning incorporates co-benefits or other regulatory-driven priorities. The assessed programs cover wetlands and streams, at-risk species, water quality, stormwater, greenhouse gases, and natural resource damages. They range from somewhat centrally planned programs in which spatially explicit planning is more common to distributed, market-based approaches in which such planning is less common. Large-scale planning appears to face few barriers to development and use, but its uptake may be limited by other factors like cost and time, uncertainty in the required spatial models, or insufficient proof of value. There has been little study of such planning’s investment return, environmental outcomes, or permitting time