Nitrogen Management for Carbon Credit
Poster Number:
217
Presenter/Primary Author:
Neville Millar Since the 1970s, hundreds of environmental markets have operated throughout the US. Recently, carbon markets have been proposed as a mechanism to help reduce the major agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Offset credits generated by reducing these emissions through altered management practices on farms are attractive to legislative bodies looking at off-site mitigation as an effective way to compensate for environmental damage from regulated sectors. A mandatory carbon market starts next year in the US with California's cap and trade program coming on line. Currently agricultural carbon credits can be traded on the voluntary market through several registries in the US, including those linked to the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), Climate Action Reserve (CAR), and American Carbon Registry (ACR).
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is the major GHG emitted by US agriculture accounting for ~70% of total US N2O emissions. With a GWP of ~300 it is a low hanging fruit for offset project development, due to the high CO2 equivalent (CO2e) payback associated with its emission prevention. In a win-win-win-win scenario, farmers through adoption of nitrogen best management practices (N-BMPs) can reduce the agricultural footprint of this potent GHG while maintaining crop productivity, decrease levels of other reactive N species in the environment, and play a major role in delivering carbon credits to regulated industries while receiving financial compensation for doing so.
Here, we present an overview of current offset protocols that use N-BMPs on cropped farmland as their driver for N2O emissions reductions and offset credit generation, and that pave the way for farm-based project development. We place particular emphasis on our protocol developed from empirical field research at KBS LTER and commercial farmer fields in Michigan and that uses N fertilizer rate as a robust predictor of N2O emissions. We discuss barriers to broad scale implementation of this protocol including the willingness of aggregators and farmers to participate, which is strongly dependent on the ease of use and price of carbon.
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