Climate Change
Climate change presents a major challenge to agriculture. Changing growing seasons and less rainfall in already dry areas are likely to make growing crops using traditional methods increasingly difficult. 1 Productivity is predicted to decline as a result, raising concerns about how to meet increasing global demand for food.
One third of man-made greenhouse gas emissions can be directly or indirectly traced back to agricultural processes. Direct emissions account for 14% of this, and almost a third thereof is attributed to livestock.2 The remaining emissions are connected to changes in land use, for example as a result of deforestation.
Agriculture can make a significant contribution to global efforts to tackle climate change by reducing their emissions. Farmers can do this by using energy and fertilizers more efficiently, and improving carbon capture in plants and soil. Improving productivity on existing farmland also helps to prevent forests being cleared to expand agricultural areas. Growing crops for conversion into fuel (known as biofuels) can reduce emissions by providing a lower-carbon alternative to fossil fuels for transportation.
Syngenta’s contribution
Syngenta is addressing climate change in two key ways. First, we are helping farmers adapt to changing climate patterns and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Second, we are making our own operations more energy efficient and encouraging our suppliers and others throughout our value chain to do the same.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the key challenge, but innovation is also crucial to enable agriculture to adapt to an already changing climate. We are investing in developing new crop varieties, crop protection products and agricultural processes that will help farmers grow more resilient crops that can withstand more extreme weather and temperatures see (water).
We are also developing new crop varieties and techniques that will make producing fuel from plants more efficient. This will help make biofuels a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
Our commitments
We made a series of commitments to help tackle climate change in 2007. Syngenta is committed to:
- Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in relation to EBIT in our own operations
- Continuously improving the energy efficiency of our operations
- Investing in technical solutions that will increase carbon capture and nitrogen efficiency in agriculture
- Helping our customers implement farming methods that reduce greenhouse gas emissions
- Developing new crop varieties and techniques that will make producing fuel from plants more efficient and biofuels a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
- Enabling agriculture to adapt to a changing climate.
We recognize that energy is used to manufacture our products, but our analysis shows that the resulting emissions from this energy use are significantly outweighed by the role our products play in helping farmers reduce emissions from agriculture. For an analysis of emissions in our value chain and information on how we are working to reduce emissions from our own operations, see environment.
| 1 | Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, November 2007 |
| 2 | Stern Review on the economics of climate change, January 2007 |
