Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture: A developing country perspective
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05/03/2010
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Institute for Social and Economic Change
This document contains the presentation made by Umesh Babu at National climate research conference, IIT Delhi, March 5-6, 2010.
Central to global measures to contain climate change is reduction in emissions of GHGs. Several times, non-annex countries like India and China are blamed for Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, particularly from sector like agricultural and unmanaged livestock. GHG reduction should be at macro level and on the other hand adoption measures should be at micro level. We assumed that in agriculture sector, more than emissions, its likely to enhance sequestration as well. For this we have selected Tungabhadra River basin command area in south India which is primarily constituted with agrarian activities and have estimated Methane (CH4) and Nitrous Oxide (N2O) from flood irrigation, field burning of agricultural residues, applications of nitrogen fertilizers, enteric fermentation etc., and also estimated the potential for carbon sequestration. End results shows that enteric fermentation and manure management contribute more (55 per cent) followed by rice cultivation (25 per cent). We have followed the Revised IPCC (1996) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventory methodology for GHG estimations. In this paper, we present the possible potential gains from various sequestration measures that could be routed for realizing Millennium Development Goals.