The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today published a notice in the Federal Register seeking public comment on an update to the report titled Quantifying Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Agriculture and Forestry: Methods for Entity Scale Inventory.The report provides farmers, ranchers and forest landowners with methods and tools to assess the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of their operations. The update improves methods outlined in the report to increase their accuracy, provides new methods that allow users to quantify the GHG benefits of additional management practices, and introduces several improvements to make the report more user-friendly. See the update to the report and provide comments.
The report was originally published in 2014 in response to Section 2709 of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, which directed USDA to “establish technical guidelines that outline science-based methods to measure the environmental service benefits from conservation and land management activities in order to facilitate the participation of farmers, ranchers and forest landowners in emerging environmental services markets.”
The update to the report brings to bear the expertise of more than 60 authors, including USDA scientists, university researchers, and experts from nongovernment environmental organizations and research institutions to develop consistent metrics for estimating changes in GHG emissions and carbon sequestration for farm, ranch and forest operations. These estimation methods are the foundation for COMET-Farm, an online carbon and greenhouse gas accounting system developed by USDA and Colorado State University, and helps farmers and ranchers create a farm-scale GHG inventory and provides them with a range of management scenarios that, if implemented, could reduce GHG emissions from their operations.
The update ensures the report and USDA’s farm-scale GHG accounting tools continue to reflect the state of the science, providing guidance to farmers, ranchers and forest landowners interested in quantifying the GHG benefits of management changes in their operation. The guidance and tools will also help USDA assess the benefits of current and future conservation programs and initiatives.
USDA has been a leader in conducting regional and national GHG inventories for decades, and its scientists have a long history of collaborative research with universities to advance the scientific understanding of agriculture’s role in helping to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
The Federal Register Notice will be available for 30 days.
