Global Nitrogen Policy

Introduction

Excess nitrogen from agriculture, smokestacks and tailpipes has exacerbated a number of environmental problems globally.

Nitrogen is essential to the survival of all life forms. The huge amount of nitrogen present in the Earth's atmosphere is in an inert form that is unavailable to all but a few kinds of bacteria. The much smaller amounts of available forms of nitrogen that cycle through land, freshwater, and marine ecosystems often limit the productivity of plants and animals. Humans have more than doubled the amount of usable nitrogen added to the earth’s ecosystems annually through use of fertilizers in agriculture and the combustion of fossil fuels. While increasing agricultural productivity, excess nitrogen leaching from agricultural fields and emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes has exacerbated a number of environmental issues, including smog, acid deposition, climate change, coastal eutrophication (algal blooms), and stratospheric ozone depletion, all of which have impacts on people and ecosystems on a regional or global basis. At the same time, there are still many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere where farmers cannot afford fertilizers, where the native soil nitrogen has declined through erosion, and where there is too little available nitrogen to sustain agricultural production. Hence, human alterations of the nitrogen cycle have caused a variety of environmental and human health problems ranging from too little to too much reactive nitrogen in the environment.

International Nitrogen Initiative (INI)

	The overall goal of the International Nitrogen Initiative is to optimize nitrogen’s beneficial role in sustainable food production.

In order to advance our understanding of human alteration of the nitrogen cycle and to seek solutions to the regional problems of too little or too much reactive nitrogen in the biosphere, a group of scientists formed the International Nitrogen Initiative (INI). A small group of like-minded individuals including Dr. William Moomaw of Tufts University, Drs. Eric Davidson and Kilaparti Ramakrishna of the Woods Hole Research Center, Dr. James Galloway of the University of Virginia, Dr. Robert Howarth of Cornell University, and Dr. Jerry Mellilo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole formed an organizing committee to help make the initiative become a reality. The INI has since been formally sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) and by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP). The overall goal of the International Nitrogen Initiative is to optimize nitrogen’s beneficial role in sustainable food production and minimize nitrogen’s negative effects on human health and the environment resulting from food and energy production.

An upcoming activity of the INI is the 4th International Nitrogen Conference, which will be held in October 2007 in Brazil (N2007). Two major challenges now face human society. First, much of the planet has still not seen the benefits of nitrogen fertilizer and the Green Revolution. And second, nowhere on Earth is nitrogen yet used in a sustainable way, and this is the “Achilles Heel” of the Green Revolution. The goal of the N2007 Conference is to address these two challenges in an integrated manner. The meeting will bring together some of the world’s best nitrogen scientists with development experts to build a vision for revising the Green Revolution into a more sustainable process while bringing it to the most needy populations.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), which was launched in 2001 and was made up of experts from all corners of the world, is a collection of studies that examined the links between ecosystems and human well-being. The Assessment consisted of four major working groups - Scenarios, Conditions and Trends, Responses, and Sub-global Assessments – each of which produced an in-depth report. Global nitrogen is one of the key issues taken up by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Dr. Kilaparti Ramakrishna of the Woods Hole Research Center and Dr. Robert Howarth of Cornell University were named Convening Lead Authors for the chapter on “Nutrient Management” (478KB, PDF) within the Responses Working Group.

Nitrogen Policy Workshop

Humans have more than doubled the amount of usable nitrogen added to the earth's ecosystems annually through the use of fertilizers in agriculture and the combustion of fossil fuels.
Nitrogen Policy Workshop documents for download (pdf format): Workshop Prospectus (133KB) Workshop Participants (143KB) Workshop Final Report (181KB)

In order to engage scientists and policy makers in a common discussion about the problems of too much or too little reactive nitrogen in the environment, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Woods Hole Research Center cosponsored a scientific assessment and policy workshop in Paris on March 8-10, 2006. The workshop was conducted as an activity of the International Nitrogen Initiative with financial support from the Dutch government. The primary intent of this workshop was to initiate the interaction between the scientific and policy-making communities and start a policy-oriented discussion on what could and should be done on local, national, regional, and global scales to address the disrupted nitrogen cycle.

Participants were drawn from key stakeholder groups, with a regional balance. These included policy makers who deal with this topic on a regular basis, whether they are working for governments or intergovernmental organizations; scientific and business leaders who can bring to the table the broad experience of lessons learned in our quest to attain sustainability and see ways of moving forward with this topic; academics specializing in the fields of science, law, and economics with specific ideas on coping with global environmental problems in the context of a global economy and the increasing interdependence of nations.

One of the outcomes of this nitrogen policy workshop was the recommendation to produce a non-technical review on Reactive Nitrogen in the Environment, aimed at informing policy makers and non-scientists about the problems of the environment and human health that are affected by too much or too little available nitrogen in the environment. This report will highlight linkages among these environmental and human health problems as nitrogen moves from the air, onto land, and through water bodies, thus moving across the traditional boundaries of policy instruments at local, national, regional, and global scales. This report is currently in preparation for UNEP, with scientists and economists from the International Nitrogen Initiative serving as an editorial committee.

©Woods Hole Research Center, 2008