Investigation of the Risk of Delayed Action to Mitigation of Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Agricultural Systems

Abstract

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the human population has grown from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people during the last century. As a conclusion, extensive consumption of fossil energy resources has associated with a significant increase in the mass of greenhouse gases. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is one of the greenhouse gases with tremendous global warming potential and the creation of reactive nitrogen compounds has increased by 120%. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing fossil fuel sources has been posed new challenges to agriculture. Because of the potential future effects of global climate change, people want to produce renewable fuel to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but as the same time N2O emission increase because of feedstock production and fertilizer production. Therefore, decision-makers need to develop the potential of mitigation strategies to quantify and address the uncertainty of N2O emissions, so the correct strategies to mitigate N2O emissions from agricultural systems can be found. According to policymakers, in a risk condition, each day of delay is associated with a risk of increasing greenhouse gas emissions instead of declining, so actions also need to be timely. The purpose of this study is to investigate of the risk of delayed action to mitigate N2O emissions from agricultural systems. In this context, the consequences of inaction, risk analysis methods, N2O mitigation technologies, cost associated mitigation strategies were analyzed and examined through the appropriate methods. According to results, the impact of one single year of delaying abatement would cause around 1.9 GtCO2e of additional emissions globally in that year. Also, the average effective lifetime of infrastructure is 10 years in the greenhouse gas cost curve model, so the model shows us a delay of 10 years would cut the potential abatement in 2030 would fall from 38 to 19 GtCO2e.