Greenhouse Gas Emission Mitigation and Emission Intensities in Agriculture

Energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions are closely linked. This paper reviews agricultural options to reduce energy intensities and their impacts, discusses important accounting issues related to system boundaries, land scarcity, and measurement units, and compares agricultural energy intensities and improvement potentials on an international level. Agricultural development in the past decades, while increasing yields, led to lower average energy efficiencies between the sixties and mid eighties. In the last two decades, energy intensities in developed countries increased, however, with little impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Efficiency differences across countries suggest a maximum improvement potential of 500 million tons of CO2 annually.