Post COP 21 and the Paris Agreement: opportunities for the land sector

Introduction

The land sector is uniquely positioned to contribute to climate change mitigation, being capable of reducing emissions resulting from agriculture and land use change, as well as offsetting emissions by sequestering carbon in vegetation and soils.

One of the primary goals of the Paris Agreement also know as COP21 is "to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century". The land sector is likely to play an increasingly important role in the future in both reducing emissions and providing a sink to offset those emissions which ultimately cannot be removed from the atmosphere.

Emissions from the land sector