All Climate Events

Tuesday, February 12, 2019. 1:00PM. Webinar: Sequestering carbon in agricultural soils: What works? Sara Vie, University of Maryland, College Park. Sponsored by USDA Northeast Climate Hub. More information here.

The impacts of climate change are becoming more pronounced each year, and greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to avoid the worst case scenarios for the future.  However, emissions reductions alone will not be enough.  We also need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. This webinar concerns strategies for sequestering carbon in agricultural soils—commonly known as “carbon farming”.  Based on a review of the scientific literature, Dr. Via will highlight a set of evidence-based strategies for sequestering carbon on farms and consider promising practices that require further research and validation.  These strategies have been chosen to align with NRCS conservation practices and many are already used in Maryland to reduce nutrient flows to Chesapeake Bay.  Using records of acreages enrolled in each practice from 2007-2017 from the Maryland Department of Agriculture and estimates of GHG reductions/acre/year from COMET-Planner, we found that agriculture can make a substantial contribution toward mitigating climate change.  Maryland is currently developing an incentive program to increase the use of these evidence-based carbon-sequestering practices, which will help the state meet its ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals.  The economic and environmental costs and benefits of each practice, as well as barriers to increasing the use of these practices will also be discussed.