Circular Bioeconomy-The World Needs a Great Reset

Ritambhara Singh*

Associate Professor, Agri-Business Management, School of Agribusiness and Rural Management, Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University, Bihar, India

*Corresponding Author: Ritambhara Singh, Associate Professor, Agri-Business Management, School of Agribusiness and Rural Management, Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University, Bihar, India.

Received: July 24, 2022; Published: August 08, 2022

Abstract

The World today emits 50 billion tons of carbon-di-oxide equivalents every year. This is 40 per cent more than the emissions in the year 2019. China emits largest (twice as that of the United States of America) followed by India as the third largest emitter. However, in terms of per capita emissions, we find these numbers small due to a large population base both in China and India. The average CO₂ emissions per capita in the USA are more than 18 tons per annum, while in China it is around 8 tons and 2.5 tons in India. Agriculture, production of fossil fuels and waste management are three big sources of methane emissions. Enteric fermentation in ruminants, microbial activity in water-logged paddy fields, burning of crop residues, forest-fires, decomposition of waste, and production of gas and oil leads to methane emissions. The warming potential of methane is much stronger than carbon-di-oxide (about 28 times) and that means despite contributing smaller to the total emissions, methane’s contribution to warming is much more (7-8 times than emissions). However, life of methane in atmosphere is very less (12 years against centuries or thousands of years of CO₂), hence any effort to reduce methane emissions is worth. On a similar note, nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture are produced when nitrogen fertilizers are applied to the soils. It is true that nitrous oxide is naturally produced in soil but application of nitrogen fertilizers causes microbes to act more fiercely leading to emissions.

References

Citation

Citation: Ritambhara Singh. “Circular Bioeconomy-The World Needs a Great Reset". Acta Scientific Agriculture 6.9 (2022): 28-29.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2022 Ritambhara Singh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.