GC11E-0601:
Greenhouse Gas Reductions From Rice Cultivation And The California Cap-and-Trade Market
Monday, 15 December 2014
Robert Parkhurst, Environmental Defense Fund New York, New York, NY, United States, William Salas, Applied Geosolutions, LLC, Durham, NH, United States and Lauren Nichols, American Carbon Registry, Arlington, VA, United States
Abstract:
The California Air Resources Board is developing a compliance offset protocol for rice cultivation practices. This protocol contains three different activities that growers can take to reduce the generation of methane associated with rice cultivation – dry seeding, early drainage, and alternate wetting and drying of fields. All of these practices have been developed using the latest science and have been shown to reduce methane generation without impacting yield. Methane is the second largest anthropogenic source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for 9% of all U.S. GHG emissions from human activities. Methane is also important because it is more than 20 times more potent a GHG than carbon dioxide. The rice cultivation protocol is important because it will be the first crop-based protocol considered as a part of California’s cap-and-trade program. This session will discuss the latest developments with the protocol from stakeholders involved in the creation of the protocol. We invite you to hear lessons learnt from this experience in order to apply similar approaches to other regions/countries and crops.
