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Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture

28 - 01 February 2011 09:00 - 17:00

Meeting the challenges of food security and climate change

The Climate Change Act (2008) commits the UK to 80% statutory greenhouse gases emissions reduction by 2050 across all sectors of the economy. Farming and land use are responsible for about 7.4% of total UK emissions. Delivering the expectation that we should gain the increases in food production required from a growing population, while reducing agricultural emissions and adapting to climate change presents a unique scientific challenge this meeting proposes to explore. The meeting will also strive to reconcile the need to increase food production with the inevitable pressure on GHG emissions, at the same time as achieving a balance through land management and displacing fossil fuels with bioenergy feedstocks while enhancing carbon capture and sequestration.

Biographies and audio recordings are available below.

Download the post-meeting report, produced by the organising group.

This meeting was supported by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board; Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council; Biosciences Knowledge Transfer Network; Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network; Living With Environmental Change; National Farmers Union; Natural Environment Research Council; Technology Strategy Board.

Organisers

  • Professor Sir David Read FRS, The University of Sheffield, UK

    David is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences in the University of Sheffield. He has had a career long research interest in the symbioses between plant roots and fungi- mycorrhizas-which facilitate nutrient exchange and significantly contribute to the carbon balance of ecosystems. He was lead author of The Read Report (2009) 'Combating Climate Change-a Role for UK Forests' (220pp Stationary Office, Edinburgh) which provided an in depth analysis of the potential of afforestation to contribute to decarbonisation in the UK. He was Vice President and Biological Secretary of the Royal Society between 2003 and 2008.

  • Professor Sam Evans

  • Professor Richard Bardgett

    Richard Bardgett is Professor of Ecology at Lancaster University. His primary research interest is the study of plant-soil relationships in the context of ecosystem nutrient cycling and plant community dynamics. He has published many papers on this topic and two books:  'The Biology of Soil: A Community and Ecosystem Approach', which won the 2006 Marsh Ecology Book of the Year Award, and "Aboveground-Belowground Linkages' (2010). He is an Editor of the Journal of Ecology and serves on the Editorial Boards of Ecology Letters and Ecosystems, and is Chairman of the BBSRC's Committee B and a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA), a cross-cutting network of DIVERSITAS. Richard is recognised as a Highly Cited Researcher in the area of Environment/Ecology and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2006. 

  • Professor Sir David Baulcombe FRS

    "David Baulcombe studied Botany at Leeds (BSc) and Edinburgh (PhD) Universities. After periods in Montreal, the University of Georgia and the Cambridge Plant Breeding Institute he spent 20 years at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich. He joined Cambridge University in 2007 where he is Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Professor of Botany."

  • Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones

    Gareth graduated from Manchester University with a degree in Biology before completing a PhD at Imperial College, London in population and community ecology.  He joined the Rural Resource Management Department at SAC (Edinburgh) in 1990 as a Senior bioeconomist.  He became Head of the Rural Resource Management Department in SAC in 1995, and got the Chair of Agriculture and Land Use in the Bangor University in 1998. In 2010 he was appointed as the Waitrose Chair of Sustainable Agriculture in Aberystwyth University, a role he undertakes part time alongside his Bangor duties. His research interests span a range of issues concerned with food production and wise use of the environment including: carbon accounting, agricultural policy and the environment, the economics of nature conservation, the psychology of farming decision-making and agricultural development in Wales.  He is currently a member of the scientific advisory committee of Natural England, the Sustainable Agriculture Panel of BBSRC and the Welsh Assembly’s Land use and Climate change group.  He was previously a member of the UK Food Policy Council and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides. Gareth is married and has 2 young children.  He spends his spare time fishing, mountain biking and playing soccer. 

  • Professor Graham Farquhar FRS

    Graham Farquhar has been Professor of Environmental Biology at the Australian National University since 1988.  His areas of expertise are in photosynthesis and water use of plants, hydrological cycle and global change science. He was Science adviser and Australian delegate to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Conference of Parties, Kyoto 1997, mainly for his work on the greenhouse cost of land clearing. His research on plant photosynthesis and water use is now applied in ecophysiology and agronomy and in models of the global carbon and water cycles. He co-developed carbon isotope discrimination as a tool to increase crop water-use efficiency, which led to release of wheat varieties with greater yield in water-limited environments, and to identification of a gene controlling water-use efficiency. He helped identify the roles of ‘global dimming’ and ‘global stilling’ (windspeed decline) in reductions in evaporative demand around the world over recent decades. He is currently Vice-President (Sec B), Australian Academy of Science. 

  • Professor Maggie Gill

    Maggie is coming to the end (March 2011) of her contract as Chief Scientific Adviser for Rural Affairs and the Environment to the Scottish Government where she has been employed for 80 per cent of her time.   She is employed by the Department for International Development of the UK Government for 20 per cent, seconded from the University of Aberdeen where she holds a chair in integrated land use. Her original degree was in Agricultural science from Edinburgh University, followed by a PhD from Massey University in New Zealand.  Her research career was in livestock nutrition and livestock and the environment.  Maggie worked for the Agricultural Research Council for 13 years followed by 6 years for the Overseas Development Administration in the Natural Resources Institute.  She has worked on livestock research in UK, Australasia, North America, India, Bolivia and Kenya. In 1996 NRI was privatised and she ran a company spun out of that privatisation for 4 years.  Maggie returned to Scotland in 2000 to head up the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute before being recruited to her current post with the Scottish Government in 2006. 

  • Dr Murray Lark

    Murray Lark worked first at Silsoe Research Institute and then at Rothamsted Research where he was deputy head of the Department of Biomathematics and Bioinformatics and led the Environmetrics Research Group which develops statistical methods for the analysis of environmental properties which show complex variation in space and time.  Most of his work has been concerned with processes in the soil, with understanding nutrient cycles and mapping and monitoring soil quality.  He now works at the British Geological Survey and is visiting Professor in the Department of Applied Sciences at Cranfield University. 

  • Dr Sinclair Mayne, Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture and Rural Development

    Sinclair graduated from Queen’s University Belfast, with a BAgr in 1980 and a PhD in 1983. He has worked in research and development for over 24 years, initially at the Grassland Research Institute in England, and then the Agricultural Research Institute of Northern Ireland, Hillsborough, which became part of the Agri Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) in 2006.  His research interests include grass production and utilisation, improving the efficiency of livestock production systems and reducing the environmental impact of livestock production systems.  Following the creation of AFBI in 2006, he became Head of Agriculture Branch and in February 2009 he was appointed Departmental Scientific Adviser with the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Sinclair was awarded Fellowship of the Royal Agricultural Societies in 2004 and is the immediate Past President of the British Society of Animal Science. 

  • Professor Pete Smith, University of Aberdeen

    Pete Smith is the Royal Society Wolfson Professor of Soils and Global Change at the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, School of Biological Sciences at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK). Since 1996, he has served as Convening Lead Author, Lead Author and Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, as the Convening Lead Author of the Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Mitigation chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and for the Agriculture and Forestry chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group III). He has coordinated and participated in many national and international projects on soils, agriculture, greenhouse gases, climate change, mitigation and impacts, and ecosystem modelling. He is a Fellow of the Society of Biology, a Rothamsted Research Fellow, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society (London), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

  • Professor Jeremy Woods, Imperial College London

    Jeremy Woods is a Lecturer in bioenergy at Imperial College London working on the interplay between development, land-use and the sustainable use of natural resources. Recently he became co-director of the Porter Institute, dedicated to the development of advanced biorenewables. In 2008, he was a member of the Royal Society’s Working Group on Biofuels and was on the advisory board of the UK Gallagher Review of the indirect land use change impacts of biofuels. He has carried out assessments of advanced bioenergy systems for a number of UK, national and international bodies, including on carbon /greenhouse gas assurance and certification accreditation and in developing the framework for an international bioenergy programme in collaboration with the UN-FAO and the Global Environment Fund (GEF). He chairs the UK working group of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, is Chair of a voluntary community-based carbon offsetting charity, Plan Vivo and a trustee of the Environmental Law Foundation. His research focuses on accessing the development opportunities that arise from advanced bioenergy and biorenewables including African development and food security linkages with bioenergy production. He lectures on sustainable energy futures and environmental technologies in Imperial College London.  and a trustee of the Environmental Law Foundation. His research focuses on accessing the development opportunities that arise from advanced bioenergy and biorenewables including African development and food security linkages with bioenergy production. He lectures on sustainable energy futures and environmental technologies in Imperial College London.