Search for: All records

Abstract Agriculture is a key contributor to gaseous emissions causing climate change, the degradation of water quality, and biodiversity loss. The extant climate change crisis is driving a focus on mitigating agricultural gaseous emissions, but wider policy objectives, beyond net zero, mean that evidence on the potential co-benefits or trade-offs associated with on-farm intervention is warranted. For novelty, aggregated data on farm structure and spatial distribution for different farm types were integrated with high-resolution data on the natural environment to generate representative model farms. Accounting for existing mitigation effects, the Catchment Systems Model was then used to quantify global warming potential, emissions to water, and other outcomes for water management catchments across England under both business-as-usual and a maximum technically feasible mitigation potential scenario. Mapped spatial patterns were overlain with the distributions of areas experiencing poor water quality and biodiversity loss to examine potential co-benefits. The median business-as-usual GWP20 and GWP100, excluding embedded emissions, were estimated to be 4606 kg CO₂eq. ha⁻¹(inter-quartile range 4240 kg CO₂eq. ha−¹) and 2334 kg CO₂eq. ha⁻¹(inter-quartile range 1462 kg CO₂eq. ha⁻¹), respectively. The ratios of business-as-usual GHG emissions to monetized farm production ranged between 0.58 and 8.89 kg CO₂eq. £⁻¹for GWP20, compared with 0.53–3.99 kg CO₂eq. £⁻¹for GWP100. The maximum mitigation potentials ranged between 17 and 30% for GWP20 and 19-27% for GWP100 with both corresponding medians estimated to be ~24%. Here, we show for the first time that the co-benefits for water quality associated with reductions in phosphorus and sediment loss were both equivalent to around a 34% reduction, relative to business-as-usual, in specific management catchment reporting units where excess water pollutant loads were identified. Several mitigation measures included in the mitigation scenario were also identified as having the potential to deliver co-benefits for terrestrial biodiversity. 

Weather conditions, hydrological responses and the dynamics of key nitrogen species in field runoff were continuously monitored at 15-min resolution on the intensively instrumented North Wyke Farm Platform (NWFP), a UK National Bioscience Research Infrastructure (NBRI), to support research on sustainable and resilient agriculture in the UK. Released data spanning 2013 to 2024 for 6 selected field catchments were aggregated to daily timestep, with reference to data quality flags, to produce continuous weather data, including maximum and minimum air temperature, daily total rainfall, wind speed and quality assured daily average soil moisture content, soil temperature at 15 cm depth, runoff rates, as well as nitrate, nitrite and ammonium concentrations. External data sources were sourced to infill some gaps for the weather data and summary statistics on data coverage were generated for the other data on an annual and seasonal basis where appropriate. Along with detailed field management data, the observed data provide a valuable resource for the parameterisation, calibration and validation of physically-based models for nitrogen losses at field scale to account for alternative management practices and land use under changing climate conditions