Climate-Smart IPM: Key to U.S. Ag Resilience

Climate Change 101

Weather changes from day to day and hour by hour. Weather is what determines what we wear on any particular day. Climate is the picture we paint when we compile weather events over the long term. Our local climate determines what clothing we have in our closets and dressers.

Climate records are clear. While climate history shows frequent ups and downs in annual global surface temperature over the past 2,000 years, there has been a sharp uptick since about 1850 (Figure 1).

How do we know what temperatures were 2,000 years or more ago? Temperature history has been recorded in geologic evidence—soil cores—and biological evidence—tree rings. These historical records are referred to as paleoclimate archives.

What is driving the temperature increase? The frequent ups and downs in the historical record are the result of changes in solar and volcanic activity over time. To explain the recent sharp increase, the best evidence we have points to human activity, and specifically, changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.

What’s causing the greenhouse gas increase? The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States is from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation (Figure 2).

In addition, humans have made extensive changes in land use, increasing heat‐absorbing asphalt, concrete with roads, buildings, and roofs. Deforestation has reduced acreage of carbon‐dioxide‐absorbing vegetation. Humans have also burned peatlands to renew vegetation and improve hunting, releasing carbon stored in the peat into the atmosphere.

The increase in global surface temperatures since U.S. Civil War days is about 3.6°F. That doesn’t sound like much, so why should we be concerned? As global surface temperatures have warmed, a host of other climate indicators have also changed, including some which are impacting human health and our ability to meet our food and fiber needs like heat waves, extreme rainfall events, and extended drought.

Here is a selection of key U.S. climate indicators (USEPA, 2023): 

• Nine of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.
• Since 1896, average winter temperatures have increased by nearly 3°F across the contiguous 48 states. 
• Spring temperatures have increased by around 2°F; summer and fall temperatures have increased by about 1.5°F.
• Heat waves are occurring three times more often than they did in the 1960s; about six per year compared with two per year. 
• Nationwide, 9 of the top 10 years for extreme one‐day precipitation events have occurred since 1996.

What’s Agriculture’s Role in Climate Change?

Increases in greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant driver of climate change. Human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels for heat, electricity, and transportation—contribute about 54 billion metric tons, or gigatons (Gt), of emissions annually globally (Table 1; IPCC, 2021). Food systems, including agriculture, processing, and distribution, account for 18 Gt (Figure 3). Agriculture is about 7 Gt of that with livestock contributing 3 Gt and crop production 2 Gt.

Agriculture thus contributes about 13% to our global greenhouse gas challenge and also has enormous potential to contribute to greenhouse gas reduction goals in the following ways: 

• Reducing conversion of forest and wetlands to agricultural production. 
• Retaining and increasing carbon in grassland and cropland soils by reducing tillage, cover cropping, maintaining living roots in the soil year‐round, fallowing, or converting marginal land to conservation reserves with perennial vegetation. 
• Managing nutrients to optimize input use, including nitrogen, which currently largely depends on consumption of fossil fuels. 
• Adjusting livestock feed to reduce methane release through “enteric fermentation,” a normal process that occurs when anaerobic microbes ferment feed in animal digestive tracts. 
• Managing manure carefully to minimize methane release. 
• Adjusting rice production approaches to minimize methane release. 
• Reducing fossil fuel consumption in farming activities. 
• Providing sites for solar and wind energy production.

What About IPM?

Pest management activities generate emissions through energy from fossil fuels used to produce, transport, store, apply, and dispose of inputs. Pest management interventions can also release carbon from the soil through tillage used to manage weeds, for example.

Integrated pest management can help mitigate climate change in multiple ways: 

• Adaption. IPM tactics can help detect and respond to new pest arrivals, for example, as warmer climates allow species to thrive in regions that were formerly too cold. Producers may tap specific IPM tools such as monitoring traps or sampling routines even ahead of new species arrivals for early detection of potential new pests. 
• Carbon sequestration. Examples include planting cover crops or intercropping to improve biological control, or help manage weeds, nematodes, or soil pathogens. These plantings remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Carbon in roots and non‐harvested portions of aboveground plant parts contributes to soil organic matter. 
• Reduce emissions. When pest management interventions are avoided, for example, by using scouting and thresholds, or monitoring weather for conditions not favorable for diseases, emissions associated with production, transport, storage, application, and waste disposal are also avoided. When an intervention is needed, some options may generate fewer emissions. Finally, when yield is improved, for example, by precisely timing inputs, fewer emissions are generated per unit of production. 
• Supporting other efforts. Ensuring continued IPM can support other mitigation efforts, such as transitioning to livestock feed crops that reduce methane emissions from livestock or changing rice production methods to reduce emissions.

Examples of IPM in Action

Life‐cycle analyses of three biopesticides compared with synthetic chemical alternatives revealed potential to generate CO ₂ emissions savings of 5,500, 9600, and 12,800 metric tons from each $1 million in sales of the products (Boundless 2021, 2022a, 2022b).

Researchers estimated that using pomace produced by the tomato‐processing industry in California to biosolarize soil as an alternative to chemical fumigants and herbicides could eliminate as much as 8,500 tons of CO ₂ emissions annually (Oldfield et al., 2017).

Greenhouse gas contributions from crop protection inputs—chemical and non‐chemical—are generated from production, storage, transport, application, and waste management. Contributions from pesticide application are generally roughly estimated (e.g., Field to Market captures number of applications by type—insecticide, fungicide, and herbicide) and use a factor for each type to calculate values for their greenhouse metric (Field to Market, 2017).

The list of IPM practices with climate change mitigation potential is long and broad. A recent review of USDA‐NRCS practice standards and technical documents identified more than 40 IPM practices with potential for improving adaptation, emissions reduction, and sequestration.

What’s Needed to More Fully Benefit from IPM’s Mitigation Potential?

Both public and private opportunities are emerging to recognize contributions to climate change mitigation. For example, when purchasing air travel or renting a car, you may be presented with options to pay more to offset the greenhouse gas emissions generated by your travel. Those funds may be applied through a marketplace to the costs of activities that mitigate a proportional amount of emissions, perhaps reforestation or clean energy projects.

Government‐supported opportunities are also expanding, including in the U.S. through the $369 billion recently committed to climate change mitigation through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Relief Act. The IRA alone provides $19.5 billion dedicated to climate‐smart agriculture.

However, agriculture currently accounts for less than 2% of the activity in climate change mitigation markets. Integrated pest management was not a part of the discussion for commitment of new NRCS investments until recently.

Participation for IPM in climate initiatives is in its infancy. Some key actions needed to benefit from IPM include: 

1. Increasing awareness of and appreciation for IPM’s potential among producers and producer groups, crop advisers, policymakers, program leaders, and the public.
2. Securing a seat at the table for IPM in current and future discussions and workgroups on public and private climate‐smart agriculture initiatives.
3. Developing consensus processes and protocols for assigning climate benefit valuations to IPM practices.
4. Identifying and prioritizing IPM practices for valuation, including identifying and filling gaps in data needed to assign value.
5. Outreach to producers and influencers, including CCAs to promote participation in opportunities for technical and financial assistance as they emerge.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

This year, the Climate, Ecosystem Services, and IPM Alliance was formed with the intention of building a “big tent” public–private consortium of producers, advisers, input and technology providers, risk managers, ecosystem service market developers, policymakers, and others to shepherd an agenda for IPM in U.S. agriculture to better meet current challenges. The agenda includes updating federal programs for IPM research and implementation, which have not been refreshed since the 1990s. It also includes a focus on climate opportunities as well as untapped opportunities in biodiversity and soil health.

The Alliance grew out of a series of online discussions with about 20 leaders in U.S. agriculture last fall. These leaders developed a priority list of opportunities and challenges and singled out climate opportunities as a “hot iron” topic given current public and private investments. Consortium leaders, including the author, are currently recruiting participation and support, and pursing foundational tasks including literature review, gap analysis, expert lists, and other resources. For more information, readers may contact the author at ipmworks@ipminstitute.org.

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this article was supported by USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Crop Protection and Pest Management Program through the North Central IPM Center, and by the Biological Products Industry Alliance and ProFarm, a subsidiary of Bioceres.