Rapid Decision Support to Manage Carbon-Nutrient-Water Trade-offs from California’s Landmark Methane Policy
UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, UC Merced, Berkeley Lab, Sandia Lab
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is second only to carbon dioxide in changing the Earth’s climate. The atmospheric levels of methane have grown to 1920 ppb, and have accelerated over the last two decades.
In California, landfills alone account for 20% of methane emissions. The source of these emissions is organic material (e.g. food waste) that is converted into methane by bacteria.
California’s landmark policy on methane emissions (SB 1383) mandates the diversion of 75% of organic waste from entering landfills by 2025. This policy will result in unprecedented use of compost and other organics for application to lands. Given the short time-frame for implementation and the massive scale of these activities, there is now an urgent need to develop decision support that can optimize the benefits of land application in the form of carbon sequestration, nutrient delivery, and water management while avoiding negative impacts, particularly to air and water quality in disadvantaged communities.
Organic management is complicated by trade-offs between carbon, nutrient, and water systems. Analyzing any one of these systems alone is likely to, at best, result in sub-optimal performance and, at worst, cause unintended consequences. Due to these complex trade-offs, the development of robust decision support will require the integration of expertise across multiple fields of expertise.
To address this immediate challenge for California, we propose a research and end-user engagement project, combining resources across University of California and Department of Energy laboratories. Research will be organized around three areas: (1) landscape model development to provide decision support for farmers and other land managers to apply organics with optimal carbon-water-nutrient benefits; (2) geospatial life-cycle model development for policy decision support to minimize distribution costs and life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions; and (3) waste characterization and growth experiments to fill gaps in knowledge on organics management across a diverse range of feedstocks, soil types, climates, and crop varieties. Our team has a record of public impact research with stakeholders from local and state government, as well as industrial and agricultural businesses, that are tasked with implementation of this policy. By integrating activities across research labs and end-user partners we will develop decision support tools that will help realize the full benefits of California’s methane emissions policy, while creating a framework for sustainable organic management in communities more broadly.