Promoting climate-smart agriculture

5 November 2009

Report explores mutual benefits, trade-offs in tackling hunger and climate change.

The twin battles to improve food security for a growing world population and contain climate change can be fought on the same front—the world's farmland, FAO said in a new report released today. Agriculture not only suffers the impacts of climate change, it is also responsible for 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But agriculture has the potential to be an important part of the solution, through mitigation—reducing and/or removing—a significant amount of global emissions, FAO says. Some 70 percent of this mitigation potential could be realized in developing countries.

"Many effective strategies for climate change mitigation from agriculture also benefit food security, development and adaptation to climate change," said FAO Assistant Director-General Alexander Müller. "The challenge is to capture these potential synergies, while managing trade-offs that may have negative impacts on food security."

Read the full news at: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/36894/icode/