Nitrogen management offers potential for win-win solutions
Increasing use of nitrogen has boosted food production for the growing world population; at the same time, nitrogen emissions have contributed to threats to biodiversity, air and water quality, and climate change. Continued population growth is expected to exacerbate these problems; in 2012 MAG contributed to a forthcoming review paper on the “Global Nitrogen Cycle in the 21st Century” for the UK Royal Society.
In principle, balanced nitrogen management could achieve multiple development and environmental benefits including human nutrition (Fischer et al., 2012). However, up to now, global scenarios of future nitrogen emissions that would allow quantitative exploration of such co-benefits have emerged only as a by-product of the global greenhouse gas emission scenarios developed for the climate modeling community. As these focus on GHG emissions, the available scenarios might not span the entire possible range of future nitrogen emissions, and do not explicitly address the scope – and importance – of possible policy interventions to manage nitrogen at the different stages.
MAG, together with the International Nitrogen Initiative, organized a workshop to review the key assumptions of the currently available nitrogen scenarios for the 21st century and discuss the factors that could lead to different developments (breakpoints and options for policy interventions). Participants at the meeting agreed to include future nitrogen scenarios, in addition to greenhouse gases, in the development of the “Shared Socio-economic Pathways” (SSP) that are currently being developed as an input to future climate calculations for the IPCC.