No reason to demonise farming
OPINION: New Zealand has said it is going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by ‘a lot’ and ‘in a short time’. One of those gases is methane. Our biggest producer of methane is livestock farming.
SLMACC supports new climate change knowledge generation in the agriculture and forestry sectors for adaption, mitigation, and cross-cutting issues.
Ministry for Primary Industries Director General, Martyn Dunne says it's essential to invest in research to better understand our future operating environment and how we need to adapt.
“We set research priority topics each funding round based on themes areas we want to investigate further for the benefit of primary industries. We consult internal and external experts to determine those topics.”
This year there were 12 priority topic areas under the three themes:
impacts of climate change and adaptionmitigation of agricultural and forestry greenhouse gas (GHG) emissionscross-cutting issues, including economic analysis, life-cycle analysis, farm catchment systems analysis, and social impact.
“We received an extremely high calibre of applicants and were very impressed with the proposed research topics,” says Dunne.
“Each project will take up to three years to complete, and the findings will help researchers, government, and farmers better understand, adapt to and mitigate climate change effects in New Zealand's primary sectors.
“At each project's end, the full report will be made available on this website and the Climate Cloud website, and user friendly summaries will be made more widely available.”
