Rapidly rising emissions from China’s agricultural machinery could “hinder” the country’s push to net-zero, according to new research.
The study, published in Nature Food, finds that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from agricultural machinery have increased approximately seven-fold in the country since 1985.
Using government statistics on the quantity of farm equipment over time, researchers calculate the changes in CO2 emissions and other air pollutants between 1985 and 2020.
They find that CO2 emissions from farm equipment have grown, on average, by nearly 6% annually since 1985.
Based on “anticipated trends”, they say, increased mechanisation of agriculture could account for 21% of China’s total emissions in 2050, under a pathway to its 2060 net-zero goal.
This could make it harder for China to meet its emissions reduction goals, as well as “degrade” its air quality, the authors say.
However, the study also finds that widespread adoption of machinery powered with renewable energy could mitigate 65-70% of these emissions.
One expert, who was not involved in the research, tells Carbon Brief that the work is “valuable”, although she adds that farm machinery would likely not reach such a large proportion of total emissions:
“If China is making rapid progress in reducing emissions from other emitters…then I expect it will have made significant progress in the decarbonisation of agricultural machinery too.”
Machinery-related emissions
Food systems are responsible for around one-third of human-driven greenhouse gas emissions.
This figure includes everything associated with producing food – from the emissions caused by deforestation or other land-use changes to the methane belched by cows or off-gassed from manure.
In the new study, researchers rely on data from the China Statistical Yearbook, which provides annual statistics on a wide range of socioeconomic indicators. From the yearbook, the researchers use data on both the quantity and power of agricultural machinery in use in the country, as well as the properties of the fuel used in the machinery, cultivated land area, population and more.
In addition to CO2 emissions, the researchers calculate the machinery-related emissions of three types of air pollutants: fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and total hydrocarbons (THC).
They divide the equipment into four categories: small tractors, large tractors, field-management machinery and harvest machinery. Then, they calculate the CO2, PM2.5, NOx and THC emissions for each type of machinery in each year.
The chart below shows the CO2 emissions for the study period of 1985 to 2020. The bars show emissions resulting from harvesting machinery (light blue), field-management machinery (pink), small tractors (light green) and large tractors (dark green).
They find that the total farm equipment CO2 emissions have increased from around 23m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) in 1985 to nearly 160MtCO2 in 2020, growing annually by a rate of 5.7%.
This is equivalent to around 1.5% of the country’s total emissions in 2020. While this is only a small percentage, the amount of CO2 actually exceeds the annual emissions of entire countries – such as the Netherlands, the Philippines and Nigeria, the authors note.
In particular, the emissions contribution of large tractors has increased steadily since 2005. The authors attribute this to a “series of policies to promote large-scale machinery”.
Disaggregating the emissions of agricultural machinery from food systems more broadly “provides a unique perspective”, says Prof Zhangcai Qin, from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Qin, who was not involved in the new study, says that doing so “allow[s] policymakers to design targeted interventions without compromising agricultural productivity”.
Regional breakdown
The researchers also break the emissions down to the province level, finding a large range of agricultural machinery emissions – from 0.1MtCO2 for the lowest-emitting provinces to 17.5MtCO2 for the highest emitters.
They find that five provinces in eastern and north-eastern China – Shandong, Henan, Heilongjiang, Hebei and Anhui – account for more than 40% of agricultural machinery emissions. Together, those provinces contain one-third of the country’s cropland area and about 46% of the total engine power.
However, even between these high-emitting regions, the makeup of the machinery was different, with some provinces more dependent on large tractors and some more dominated by field-management machinery.
The sub-national emissions analysis is one of the key advances of the new research, says Dr Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor at Our World in Data. Ritchie, who was not involved in the study, explains:
“This spatial resolution of emissions estimates is valuable, because there is such large [variety] across a country of China’s size. It also offers important insights into potential emissions pathways in the future, under different rates of mechanisation and low-carbon technology uptake.”
Growth factors
The researchers identify four socioeconomic factors contributing to the rise in emissions: population growth, changes in per-capita cropland area, level of mechanisation and emissions intensity.
The chart below shows the change in CO2 emissions (black) due to changes in emission intensity (dark blue), level of mechanisation (light blue), per-capita cropland area (yellow) and population (orange).
Of those, the increasing level of mechanisation “dominate[s]” the change in emissions, the paper says. It notes that these changes alone were responsible for around a 100% increase in emissions over 1985-2000.
Population growth was another large driver of increasing farm equipment emissions over the early part of the study period, the study notes, but it has been less of a factor since 2000.
In contrast, increasing emissions intensity uniformly acted to decrease emissions, the authors say, while “tillage pressure” increased emissions early on in the study period, but decreased emissions since 2000.
Carbon goals
Under current policies, China aims to “achieve comprehensive mechanisation in major crop production processes by 2035”, the authors note.
Therefore, unabated continued growth of agricultural mechanisation could compromise China’s efforts to achieve its “dual-carbon” goals, they warn.
(The term “dual-carbon” goals refers to the country’s pledge to reach peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.)
They write that effective mitigation of these emissions will require different strategies in the short- and long-term future, noting that near-term availability means that “biofuels and natural gas [will] play an important role over the coming decade”.
In the longer term, they say, renewable energy sources, as well as green hydrogen, “have the largest mitigation potential”. Previous work has shown that using automated equipment, electric tractors and renewable energy sources can reduce agricultural emissions by 90%.
Ritchie says she is “a bit sceptical that the relative contributions of agricultural machinery will be as high as 20% in 2050”. She adds:
“This rests on the assumption that these emissions go mostly unabated, while most other sectors rapidly decline. If China is making rapid progress in reducing emissions from other emitters, including larger on-road transport, such as trucks and other agricultural emissions…then I expect it will have made significant progress in the decarbonisation of agricultural machinery too.”
The post Rising emissions from farm equipment could ‘hinder’ China’s net-zero goals appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Rising emissions from farm equipment could ‘hinder’ China’s net-zero goals
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amo