Agricultural / Climate Change

The U.S. agricultural sector can play a significant role in helping to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) while offering multiple ancillary environmental and economic benefits to society and the sector. To fully capture the GHG-reducing benefits from the agricultural sector, federal, regional, and state-level policies must appropriately incorporate agricultural mitigation strategies and technologies in order to maximize emissions reductions on behalf of society, at lowest possible cost, while also ensuring fair and adequate income generation opportunities to agricultural producers.

Within cap-and-trade policies, in particular, the policy construct for soil carbon sequestration and other agricultural emissions reduction technologies will determine how much emissions reductions are achieved, at what costs to society and capped sectors, and at what benefit to agriculture