In a recent World Resources Institute (WRI) blog post entitled “Regenerative Agriculture: Good for Soil Health, but Limited Potential to Mitigate Climate Change”, Ranganathan etal. (2020), dismiss the potential for regenerative agriculture to contribute to the “largescale
emission reductions” and CO2 removal needed to hold global warming below the 2 oC threshold in the Paris Accords. We believe their blog post merits comment and critique. Given the severity of the climate change challenge and the urgent need to decarbonize the global economy, while also actively drawing down CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, all viable options are needed to help solve the problem. We believe that the science is clear that regenerative agriculture can in fact contribute significant emission reductions and CO2 removal, as well as improve soil health. Unfortunately, we believe the WRI post confuses rather than clarifies the scientific and policy issues concerning the role and potential of regenerative agriculture to contribute to climate change mitigation.

First, the WRI piece poorly characterized the practices and principles comprising the suite of conservation management practices that are often referred to as “regenerative agriculture”. These principles are widely understood to include: 1) maintaining (to the degree possible) continuous vegetation cover on the soil, 2) reducing soil disturbance, 3) increasing the amount and diversity of organic residues returned to the soil and 4) maximizing nutrient and water use efficiency by plants. Broadly these attributes are designed to more closely mimic native (e.g. prairie) ecosystems which we know maintain much higher soil C stocks than conventional annual croplands. In general, these practices work to increase soil C by increasing the amount of C added back into the soil and reducing the relative C loss rates via soil respiration and erosion. For annual cropland, these practices include reduced tillage/no-till and cover crops (as mentioned by WRI), more diverse crop rotations with higher frequency of perennial crops, but also grassed waterways and buffer strips, agroforestry (e.g., hedgerows, windbreaks), integrated livestock management with improved grazing management, and conversion of marginal lands (poorly suited to annual cropping) to perennial grasses and trees. Read More