Agriculture and Climate change

How Agriculture Leads to Climate Change
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How Agriculture Leads to Climate Change
Abstract
Food is a basic human need. Everyone needs food to survive, and hence the globalization of food production. However, the production of food happens to be one of the most notorious factors that lead to global warming. As the world is increasing in number, the field of agriculture intensifies its activities. Unknowingly to many, this intensification happens at the expense of the earth’s climate. Today, agriculture is considered one of the major factors that contribute to anthropogenic global warming. However, instead of finding alternatives to help change the production mechanisms, the world is investing in more sophisticated ways of farming. Therefore, the world continues to waste away. There is a likelihood that things will not change soon since the developing nations are catching up with the developed nations’ means of food production. However, alarm calls are already going off all over the world because the inevitability of global warming intensifying is imminent.
Introduction
Food remains a basic human need. Individuals need to consume a healthy diet to ensure their health and wellbeing. The production of food has become globalized. Complex systems have been developed to ensure that food produced in one part of the world can be consumed in a different region. For instance, European foods are consumed in the rest of the globe. Before food reaches our plates, it undergoes processes like processing and transportation. All these processes contribute to the production of greenhouse gasses (GHGs). A growing population and changing diets are increasing the demand for food. Production keeps on straining to meet the crop yields. The challenge remains agriculture’s vulnerability to climate change. Because of climate change, the world experiences increased temperatures, rainfall variation and extreme weather events (Kundzewicz, 2016). Climate change minimizes crop yield, livestock production, and the major cereals’ nutritional quality on the farms. As climate change adversely affects agriculture, it is important to note that agriculture is a major part of the climate change problem. This paper examines the contributions of agriculture towards climate change. It examines the topic by reviewing relevant literature about the topic. The paper outlines how the use of energy and food wastage leads to the production of GHGs, contributing to global warming.
Literature Review
Agriculture is considered one of the major factors that contribute to anthropogenic global warming, according to Lynch et al. (2021). The main reason for the above is that it leads to or contributes to methane and nitrous oxide emissions, which contribute greatly to global warming. Some of the pollutants from agriculture are stock pollutants, which will impact the environment for years to come (Lynch et al., 2021). For agriculture, the damage is done from two fronts. The first one, as already indicated, is the result of gaseous emissions from agriculture which the OECD (2016) reports being “17% directly through agricultural activities and an additional 7-14% through land-use changes.” Such figures reveal...