How to Tackle Climate Change, Food Security and Land Degradation

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Rutgers-led research highlights lesser-known options with fewer trade-offs.

How can some of world’s biggest problems – climate change, food security and land degradation – be tackled simultaneously?

Some lesser-known options, such as integrated water management and increasing the organic content of soil, have fewer trade-offs than many well-known options, such as planting trees, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Global Change Biology.

“We argue that if we want to have an impact on multiple problems, we need to be smart about what options get us multiple benefits and which options come with potential trade-offs,” said lead author Pamela McElwee, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “We found that many of the better-known solutions to climate mitigation and land degradation come with a lot of potentially significant trade-offs.”

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