Search for: All records

Agriculture’s global environmental impacts are widely expected to continue expanding, driven by population and economic growth and dietary changes. This Review highlights climate change as an additional amplifier of agriculture’s environmental impacts, by reducing agricultural productivity, reducing the efficacy of agrochemicals, increasing soil erosion, accelerating the growth and expanding the range of crop diseases and pests, and increasing land clearing. We identify multiple pathways through which climate change intensifies agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, creating a potentially powerful climate change–reinforcing feedback loop. The challenges raised by climate change underscore the urgent need to transition to sustainable, climate-resilient agricultural systems. This requires investments that both accelerate adoption of proven solutions that provide multiple benefits, and that discover and scale new beneficial processes and food products. 

Van Meter et al . (Reports, 27 April 2018, p. 427) warn that achieving nitrogen reduction goals in the Gulf of Mexico will take decades as a result of legacy nitrogen effects. We discuss limitations of the modeling approach and demonstrate that legacy effects ranging from a few years to decades are equally consistent with observations. The presented time scales for system recovery are therefore highly uncertain.