Agriculture on the agenda at Copenhagen climate talks

Nearly 200 world leaders are in the Danish capital to demand emissions cuts in what some commentators are describing as the most important conference in a century.

Latest figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) suggest agriculture is responsible for 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is therefore seen as holding huge potential to make a difference.

“Agriculture offers readily available and cost-effective options for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, and can start to do so now,” said Alexander Müller, FAO Assistant director-general.

Mr Müller said 90 per cent of agriculture’s potential to reduce or remove emissions would come from soil management and trying to disturb the soil as little as possible ‘so that carbon is taken out of the atmosphere and parked in soils and vegetation’.

Biofuels, more efficient fertilizer use and management of livestock systems will be other major topics to come under scrutiny.

UK farming unions will be in Copenhagen to fight the farmers’ case to tackle climate change when talks officially turn to agriculture on Saturday (December 12).

Climate change lobbyists hope negotiations will not be derailed by global warming sceptics after leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit last week suggested evidence to support man-made global warming had been exaggerated.

In response to the allegations the Met Office said it would release comprehensive climate change data from over 60 years, collected by more than 1,000 weather stations from across the world later this week.

Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, welcomed the move and said sceptics who suggested the Earth was cooling because 1998 was the hottest year on record were wrong, because the past 10 years were the warmest decade on record.

He said the heat of 1998 was more likely due to the natural warming effects of the El Nino weather pattern.

Gordon Brown labelled the climate change sceptics ‘flat earthers’ and ‘anti-science’.

Nevertheless, a recent poll conducted by ICM found ‘nearly half’ of Britons believed there was no proof that global warming was caused by humans.

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