The U.S. Department of Agriculture just published an important roadmap for America’s farmers and ranchers to measure their greenhouse gas emissions and evaluate opportunities for reducing them.
Previously, insufficient data and lack of scientific consensus have impeded natural resource stewards from calculating GHG fluxes from management practices – especially since biological systems are dynamic and complex. But the new Greenhouse Gas Report provides thorough guidelines for understanding how different management practices influence GHG emissions on farms, ranches and forests.
This is a major breakthrough in mitigating the impacts of climate change on working lands. By helping landowners better understand their impacts, farmers, ranchers and forest owners will be better equipped to calculate their emissions and account for these impacts through voluntary participation in GHG mitigation or carbon sequestration projects across the country.