Environment Counts | Editors Comments-deforestation and remote sensing
Editor’s Comments
These new results have directly affected assessments of where to focus future climate remediation efforts. Specifically, the new data has shown that the relative contribution of agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) emissions to the anthropogenic total has declined over time.
| AFOLU emissions | 1990s | 2000s | 2010 |
| Share of anthropogenic emissions | 28.7 ± 1.5% | 23.6 ± 2.1% | 21.2 ± 1.5% |
In previous decades, estimates of emissions from land use (primarily deforestation) were significantly larger than those from agriculture. But in 2010 agriculture became the larger component.
| 2010 emissions | Land use (mostly deforestation) | Agriculture | |
| Share of anthropogenic emissions | 10.0 ± 1.2% | 11.2 ± 0.4% | |
In 2010 deforestation was responsible for only 8% of total anthropogenic emissions, compared to 12% in the 1990s. Since 2010, the last year assessed by the IPCC AR5, new FAO estimates indicate that land use emissions haven’t changed significantly whereas agriculture emissions have grown at roughly 1% annually.
As a result more efforts and resources are being directed to mitigation in agriculture, similar to the large efforts that had been devoted to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) in the past decade.
