PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
Emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) from agricultural production and carbon dioxide (CO2) from agricultural land use constitute some 20% of the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of Finland. According to the Climate Convention and Kyoto Protocol, the European Union has committed to reduce its GHG emissions. In Finland, reducing GHG emissions from the agricultural sector has proved to be particularly challenging. According to the Finnish Climate Panel, the most effective means of reducing GHG emissions in agriculture is through changes in land use and management. However, decisions on land use are usually not based on any optimisation process and current incentives for agriculture may even favour activities that increase GHG emissions.
OBJECTIVES
The OPAL-Life project aimed to focus on developing and implementing tools and methods to support the development of agricultural and environmental policies that safeguard rural livelihoods and have reduced environmental impacts. The project’s objective was sustainable high-yielding crop and livestock production with reduced GHG emissions through:
- Environmentally and socio-economically sustainable intensification, by narrowing the existing gap between potential and harvested yields in highly productive fields, while targeting non-responsive, poor or distant fields for extensification (e.g. green fallows, buffer zones);
- The possibility of using extensified fields to allow recovery from soil compaction and a return to food production;
- Safeguarding resilience to climate change and variability through increased diversity; and
- Afforestation on fields with little capacity to recover and return to food production in the long-term.
Finally, the project would monitor how this new co-existence of intensification, extensification and afforestation is acceptable and feasible for farmers, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of GHG reduction.
RESULTS
The OPAL-Life project developed a land-use optimisation tool, which provided data to aid the decision-making of 20 pilot farmers as well as an additional 1 080 farmers in southwestern Finland. The tool has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and LULUCF sectors by 1 300 kilotonnes by 2035, if the suggested land use changes are implemented. This decrease represents 5% of the current emissions in agricultural sector.
The project also carried out extensive research on GHG emissions from agricultural land, soil recovery, impact on biodiversity and economic sustainability related to land use optimisation. The results were widely disseminated among the scientific community, the farming sector and policy-makers. The team moreover developed new methods based on behavioural sciences for studying farmers' decision-making amid climate change uncertainty. For the first time in Finland, barriers to climate mitigation, climate change opportunities and the views of farming groups on climate change and related issues were studied.
Further information on the project can be found in the project's layman report and After-LIFE Communication Plan(see "Read more" section).
