Agricultural emission reduction targets at country and global levels: a bottom-up analysis

ABSTRACT

Few countries have declared sector-specific emission reduction targets in agriculture, making it difficult to construct and assess realistic climate mitigation scenarios for analytical and policymaking purposes. We aim to fill this analytical gap by using a set of cluster analyses to gauge likely ambitions levels in reducing agricultural emission at country-level, taking into consideration important country-level characteristics and referencing the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ principle. We then use the results from the cluster analysis together with information from submitted NDCs and other considerations to design formulas for assigning numerical reduction targets to individual countries. Our main results indicate a global agricultural emission level in 2030 exceeding the limit for the 1.5°C temperature target, but representing substantially lower emissions than the no-policy scenario. At individual country-level, the scenarios consist of large emission reductions in Northern and Western Europe, followed by the USA and other developed economies, and emission increases in many developing countries. To facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, our method also contains parameters for flexibility to scale up or down ambition levels at both country and global levels, making the method useful for other researchers to develop alternative scenarios.

Key policy insights

• Agricultural emission targets at country and global level are needed for analysing the likely impacts of agricultural decarbonization

• Only 10% of Paris Agreement parties have specific pledges limiting agricultural emissions, indicating an uncertain decarbonization pathway and hindering international climate cooperation

• Our analysis based on the need, intent, readiness, and scope indicators can guide the construction of plausible mitigation scenarios at country and global levels

• By revealing factors that limit mitigation ambitions, our results can be used to develop instruments at country/multilateral levels to incentivize setting ambitious targets

• Global agricultural emissions in 2030 in our ‘plausible’ scenario exceeds the 1.5°C target, pointing to the need for enhanced global ambition

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change mitigation
• agriculture
• national determined contributions
• cluster analysis
• emission pathway development
• emissions scenario construction

Acknowledgement

We are grateful for the helpful discussions with Jørgen Dejgård Jensen, Francesco Clora, and Clara G. Bouyssou and for the useful comments from participants in our presentations at the 181^th EAAE seminar, the 25^th GTAP conference, and the XVII EAAE Congress. Valuable suggestions from three anonymous reviewers and the editor are also greatly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Supplementary material (SM) Figure A3 provides an illustration of the emission shares covered by different countries, and different types of targets.

2 See SM section S1 for more details. Other relevant indicators are not included due to data availability for broad geographical coverage.

3 Indicators are scaled to values between 0 and 1 prior to the clustering. The number of clusters is determined using the ‘elbow method’, which lowers the within-group sum of squares.

4 Uncertainties on the designations of groups 5 and 6 as either ‘less’ or ‘more’ ambitious groups are explored using a set of sensitivity analysis, as detailed in SM section 5.

5 SM Figure A5.

6 Denmark has been selected as the reference country here, due to its higher ambitions on reducing agricultural emissions, as compared to other countries with absolute emission reduction targets (see SM table A1).

7 Note that BAU scenarios are estimated emission pathways assuming countries do not impose climate policies (UNFCCC, 2022a). These are not necessarily the same as the extrapolated emission trends from historical emission levels.

8 USA, Germany, and Denmark are placed in the more ambitious quantiles. Brazil, India, and China are assumed to either follow their respective historical trends or economy-wide targets. Among them, only the USA is modelled to follow a trajectory that is different across the three separate scenarios.

9 ABC and ABC+ are the names used by Brazil for the Agricultural Sector Plan for mitigation and adaptation to climate change and for the consolidation of a low carbon economy in agriculture.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding support from five Danish funding sources (Svineafgiftsfonden, Mælkeafgiftsfonden, Kvægafgiftsfonden, Fjerkræafgiftsfonden, and Norma og Frode Jakobsens Fond). These funding bodies have no influence on the research activities and the contents of this paper.