Meio Ambiente

Brazilian Enterprise of Agricultural Research (Embrapa)

Brazil has a great potential of becoming a world leader in tropical agriculture and is therefore investing increasingly more in scientific researches. In the context of climate change, there is a great effort from different areas to assess impacts and evaluate adaptation strategies for this sector.

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP-15, which is being held in Copenhagen until the next 18th December, Brazil is represented by many researchers of the Brazilian Enterprise of Agricultural Research (Embrapa), under the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply. They are attending the event with the objective of showcasing achievements made and several ongoing projects.

Among the most remarkable works, there is a research on soil management carried out by Embrapa and the Fluminense Federal University, which confirms the efficiency of direct planting system as a practice that retains more carbon in the soil.

The study shows that conventional planting stores around two times less organic carbon in the soil when compared to direct planting: a system that is based on sowing without stirring up the soil and in which the remains of the previous crops are left on the ground as a straw coverage.

According to the experiment carried out, a soil under continued direct planting prevents the emission into the atmosphere of 79.4 kg of carbon hectare/hour. On a conventional planting soil, this performance was 63.3% inferior.

Researchers from the instrumentation area, on their turn, are presenting a work in the field of sustainable development, focused on three major platforms that include agro-energy, aquaculture, climate change and the sustainable use of renewable resources, as well as food issues.