Carbon and Nitrogen Footprints Management for Environmental and Food Security

Abstract

To promote the advance food security for the increasing population, environmental security is important to the sustainable future. Agriculture is a major sector to interfere on the planet, and emitting a huge amount of the greenhouse gasses (GHGs) emission to the atmosphere, it is due to the imbalance and excessive use of chemical substances, electrical energy and high consumption of the fossil fuel. Various agricultural activities including ploughing, irrigation, crop cultivars, livestock rearing, application of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides and associated equipment also emit a significant amount of GHGs. The Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGPs) of the South Asia (SA) are a food basket of the world population. It is due to harvesting of the number of diversified cropping systems/crops in a year in same land with higher crop productivity. Where the rice–wheat cropping system (RWCS) is covering ~26 M ha in the IGPs of SA, and it is solely the major contributor to anthropogenic GHGs productions, particularly methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emission, and volatilisation of ammonia (NH3). The excessive production of GHGs is directly linked to carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) footprints, which are the key element for balancing the many components in the nature directly and indirectly. Therefore C and N of various forms regulate the fauna and flora activities, soil and crop productivity, energy consumption, atmospheric gaseous concentration, etc. Among them, N2O is responsible for ozone depletion and global climate change and has a global warming possible to 265 times than that of carbon dioxide (CO2). To reduce the GHGs emissions, it is important to users of balanced chemical fertilisers particularly N-fertilisers, improvements of the operation efficiencies of farm machinery and changes in regional allocation the RWCS. The present study is concentrated on the aspect of C and N footprints in the farming systems, which are linked to the GHGs-emission through pre-, on-and post-farm activities. Several alleviation approaches concerning to the agricultural practices are also suggest a roadmap to the policymakers, land managers and researchers, and help to the modeling for footprints of C and N for environmental, food, nutritional and economics security under the changing climate.