32nd Plenary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Submission by Sweden and The Netherlands on Interactions of reactive nitrogen
with climate change and opportunities for integrated management strategies
At a side event at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 it was proposed to focus more
attention on the role of nitrogen in climate policy development and it was proposed to
draft a report on Nitrogen and Climate. The objective of such a report is to quantify the
role of reactive nitrogen production in food production and energy use in both the excess
as well as the mining regions of the world and the effect of too little or too much nitrogen
on the greenhouse gas balance and climate forcing, the environmental and human
health impacts to identify options of N management to increase its use for food and
energy production while reducing impacts and increasing carbon storage.
Nitrogen and Climate Change are intricately linked in a number of ways, such as, nitrous
oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes 11% of global equivalent
greenhouse gas emissions; nitrous oxide results from application of manure and artificial
fertilizers, from the production of nitric acid, ammonia and a number of other chemicals;
furthermore other nitrogen compounds, such as nitrogen oxides, ammonia, nitrates are
secondary sources of nitrous oxide; nitrogen oxide is a precursor in the formation of
ozone at ground level nitrogen compounds play an important role in the formation of
aerosols that alters the radiative balance, and lastly nitrous oxide depletes the ozone
layer and impacts on the climate through these mechanisms as well.
Policies and measures to reduce nitrogen compounds in the environment have been
implemented for a long time now because of its role in acidification, eutrophication,
biodiversity loss and air quality; those policies and measures however do generally not
take the impact on the climate into account; this may imply that synergies are not used
and trade-off effects may occur; for integral decision making, detailed knowledge about
the relations of nitrogen and Climate Change is needed.
Therefore the Execute Body of the UNECE Convention on Long Range Transboundary
Air Pollution has request the Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen to draft a report on the
relation between nitrogen and Climate Change; The Task Force established an Expert
Panel on Nitrogen and Climate Change that will take up the actual writing of the report;
An expert review of the draft report has been undertaken and the Working Group on
Effects of CLTRAP accepted for submission to the Executive Board.
We believe this report is an important contribution to the AR5 that would merit
consideration by the IPCC authors. We believe it is also of interest for national policies.
Attached is the final draft of this report.
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