Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Plant Soil Nutrition: Towards Nutrient-Use Efficiency for Achieving Net-Zero Emissions

The present scenario of environmental pollution due to the escalated greenhouse gas (GHG) generation has made humanity rethink its societal and economic development. It has been anticipated that the Earth will surpass the global population of 9.2 billion by 2050 and will have more than 11 billion by the end of this century. It will create additional pressure due to increased demand for natural resources, resulting in the escalated emissions of GHGs. Furthermore, the rapidly changing lifestyle of the ever-increasing global population will also have the challenge of getting an optimal supply of food, fuel, fiber, and various other ecosystem services. It may result in the unsystematic implementation of weaker policies that could eventually result in the exploitation of natural resources, including the degradation of land, water, and many other resources. For instance, agricultural production seldom focuses on efficiently utilizing natural resources regarding the supply and uptake of nutrients in the field. Therefore, the present chapter discusses the importance of understanding the cusp of judicious development for resource utilization rather than exploitation. It will also focus on harnessing the enormous potential of understanding the mechanism of plant-soil nutrition and its relation to sequestering the GHG (i.e., CO2 due to its predominance) from the atmosphere. Through this avenue, there is a window of opportunity to enhance nutrient-use efficiency (NUE) under different systems like agronomic, agroforestry, and forestry systems, which can help increase the sequestration rate and nutrient management. Besides CO2, it will also highlight the use of essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Furthermore, focusing on such approaches in different systems will help meet multiple UN-SDGs and achieve ambitious targets towards net-zero emissions.