ABSTRACT
The hypothesis behind this book is that agriculture could, with improved management practices, absorb a significant amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) as soil carbon, and that farmers in the developing world might in some way benefit from its value as a mitigation strategy for climate change. This presupposes that climate change is taking place and is due in part to CO2, that agricultural soils could hold more of it than they do, and that there could be a climatically significant removal of CO2 if they did. As these are large assumptions, this chapter and the next set out the background.
