Optimizing crop production toward agricultural carbon neutrality in China

Highlights

	● Chinese cropland is key for achieving carbon neutrality but with challenges to overcome
	● Chinese cropland functions as a weak carbon sink but remain major GHG sources.
	● GHG emission intensity in crop production has significantly improved.
	● Improved management practices have great potential for emission reduction.

Abstract

Crop production is strategic for food security and climate change mitigation, and can provide a temporary soil carbon sink. There is an ongoing debate about how to optimize crop production in China toward carbon-neutral agriculture. This paper summarizes major carbon budgets in staple crop production in China over recent decades, synthesize reported impacts of available and developing field management practices on greenhouse gas emissions reduction and carbon sink increase. According to recent studies, cropland-based GHG emissions (55% N₂O and 44% CH₄) increased at a rate of 4.3 Tg·yr^–1 CO₂-eq from 1990 to 2015 and peaked at 400 Tg CO₂-eq in 2015. Subsequently, there was a substantial decrease of 11.6 Tg·yr^–1 CO₂-eq between 2015 and 2021. A similar bell-shape trend has been observed in yield-scaled GHG emission intensity over the years for cereals excluding rice, as rice exhibited a steady decline in yield-scaled emission intensity since 1961. For soil C in Chinese cropland, topsoil C represents a huge C pool, containing 5.5 Pg of soil organic carbon (SOC) and 2.4 Pg of soil inorganic carbon (SIC). However, these densities are relatively low globally, indicating a high C sequestration potential. Soil C in cropland has been a weak sink of 5.3 Tg·yr^–1 C in China since the 1980s, resulting from the net effect of SOC sequestration (21.3 Tg·yr^–1 C) and SIC loss (–16 Tg·yr^–1 C), which only offsets 5.7% of simultaneous cropland GHG emissions. Hence, cropland remains consistent and significant GHG sources, even when considering soil C sequestration and excluding related industrial and energy sectors. Fortunately, many reliable management practices have positive effects on emission intensity of crop production, in terms of fertilizer application, irrigation and tillage. However, the path to achieving carbon neutrality in China’s cropland is still uncertain and requires further quantitative assessment. Nonetheless, this synthesis highlights that the huge potential, and strong scientific and technical support in low-carbon crop production, for modifying China’s food system.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Carbon-neutral crop production / field management practices / greenhouse gas emissions / soil carbon sequestration

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2025602 contains supplementary materials (Figs. S1–S4; Table S1).

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (42107111, 41425007, 31988102), Chinese State Key Special Program on Severe Air Pollution Mitigation (DQGG0208), High-level Team Project of China Agricultural University (Xuejun Liu).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Tianxiang Hao, Yangyang Zhang, Yulong Yin, Jingxia Wang, Zhenling Cui, Keith Goulding, and Xuejun Liu declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2025. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)