The Pathway to China’s Carbon–Neutral Agriculture: Measures, Potential and Future Strategies

Achieving China’s agriculture carbon neutrality by 2060 aligns with national and transnational policy efforts. This paper aims to set forth a possible way for China’s carbon–neutral agriculture, which needs to produce more food with lower emissions, based on an overview of the agricultural greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2060. Our results show that China has made impressive progress in food production in the past decades with relatively low per-unit output emissions. At the same time, agricultural emissions peaked in 2016 with 842.21 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. We predict that a reduced carbon budget will offset the emissions in 2060 with a 65% increase in food production by proper mitigation measures. In addition, we put forth several strategies, including carbon–neutral capacity building, GHG emission avoidance, carbon storage, and low-carbon agrifood system establishment, to push China’s agriculture to carbon neutrality. This study provides a national perspective on achieving agricultural carbon neutrality and will interest policymakers in making low-carbon development plans.