Lead supervisor: Adam Pellegrini, Plant Sciences
Co-supervisor: David Coomes, Plant Sciences
Brief summary:
Identify emission reduction pathways along the agricultural supply chain under climate change scenarios.
Importance of the area of research concerned:
The food sector accounts for 31% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Around 2/3 of those emissions take place outside of a farming field--arising from land use change and post-production processing, trade, retail, and waste. Identifying pathways to reduce emissions along these supply chains will be critical to decarbonising the agricultural sector. However, changing climates threaten the potential to decarbonise, yet have received little focus.
Project summary :
The project will involve improving estimates of carbon emissions following land use change and along the post-production pathways. The aim is to develop a new dataset that can estimate carbon emissions from the cradle to the grave of several top commodities at the global scale. This involves integrating land use change datasets with supply chain data to estimate carbon emissions at the commodity scale.
What will the student do?:
The project will involve improving estimates of carbon emissions following land use change and along the post-production pathways. Leveraging data from the international energy agency, multi-regional input-output tables, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the project will construct detailed emission maps for five core agricultural commodities: beef, maize, soy, wheat, and rice. These emission maps will be constructed alongside predictions of natural hazards from climate model intercomparison outputs and carbon cycling multi-model comparisons.
References - references should provide further reading about the project:
Crippa, Monica, et al. "Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions." Nature Food 2.3 (2021): 198-209. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00225-9
Hong, Chaopeng, et al. "Global and regional drivers of land-use emissions in 1961–2017." Nature 589.7843 (2021): 554-561. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03138-y
Applying
You can find out about applying for this project on the Department of Plant Sciences page.