New pioneer center will pave the way for the green transition in agriculture
Denmark’s second pioneer center, the Pioneer Center for Landscape Research in Sustainable Agricultural Futures (Land-CRAFT), aims to gain knowledge about the possibilities of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector.
“There is a strong need to integrate knowledge on the environmental impacts of agriculture with landscape management to support the required transformational change in the agriculture sector and to ensure its environmental sustainability. At the same time, it is necessary to enforce adaptation to climate change to ensure food security. These challenges need to be addressed within a short time period and call for a center such as Land-CRAFT. Land-CRAFT represents a unique opportunity, since it will identify and quantify the multiple environmental and socio-economic benefits associated with the change in agricultural practices at the farm and landscape levels. Thus, it has a specific focus on the climate imprint of agriculture,” said Klaus Butterbach-Bahl, who is the head of Land-CRAFT.
Butterbach-Bahl introduced the new pioneer center at its opening on June 1 at Aarhus University’s research center in Foulum/Jutland. He explained how the Land-CRAFT Center will support the green transition of agriculture by establishing the necessary basic and interdisciplinary understanding of the processes affecting agricultural production and the associated environmental (e.g., nitrate leaching), climate (greenhouse gas emissions), and biodiversity impacts. In particular, the center will achieve these objectives by assessing how changes in agricultural practices are affecting nutrient and greenhouse gas fluxes in the landscape.
The participants at the center’s opening were also invited to visit the field at Foulumgaard. There, the researchers, among other things, explained how they will gather knowledge using local observations, remote sensing, and modeling tools.
Åbning af grundforskningscentret Land-CRAFT
