Pulse Brain · Growing Health Evidence Index
Peer-reviewed

Cost-effective mitigation of nitrogen pollution from global croplands

Baojing Gu, Xiuming Zhang, Shu Kee Lam, Yingliang Yu, Hans J. M. van Grinsven, Shaohui Zhang, Xiaoxi Wang, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Sitong Wang, Jiakun Duan, Chenchen Ren, Lex Bouwman, W. de Vries, Jianming Xu, Mark A. Sutton, Deli Chen

Nature · 2023

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Summary

g) more crop nitrogen (20% increase) with 22 ± 4 Tg less nitrogen fertilizer used (21% reduction) and 26 ± 5 Tg less nitrogen pollution (32% reduction) to the environment for the considered base year of 2015. These changes could gain a global societal benefit of 476 ± 123 billion US dollars (USD) for food supply, human health, ecosystems and climate, with net mitigation costs of only 19 ± 5 billion USD, of which 15 ± 4 billion USD fertilizer saving offsets 44% of the gross mitigation cost. To mitigate nitrogen pollution from croplands in the future, innovative policies such as a nitrogen credit system (NCS) could be implemented to select, incentivize and, where necessary, subsidize the adoption of these measures.

Source type
Peer-reviewed study
DOI
10.1038/s41586-022-05481-8
Catalogue ID
SNmokbvprg-u0vtxd
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