Scientists are sounding the alarm that certain agricultural practices aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions are likely causing more harm than good.
Research published last month in Science warns that certain efforts to reduce methane emissions could backfire by increasing emissions of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas that is less potent than methane in the short term but does more damage overall.
“Even though there’s better recognition that methane is a great target to control to bring the rate of temperature increase into some sort of order, a lot of the mechanisms ignored the nitrogen input,” said Lisa Stein, a professor at the University of Alberta and one of the paper’s authors.
“So when you’re trying to mitigate methane emissions, these technologies might inadvertently stimulate nitrous oxide production — and we don’t want that trade-off,” added Stein, who specializes in climate change microbiology.
