The crop residue burning in India particularly North-western India is responsible for air pollution episodes and public health concerns; greenhouse gases emissions and radiation imbalance; and declining soil organic matter and soil productivity. The objectives of this paper are to estimate the crop residue burning and emissions from crop residue burning, to recommend interventions in crop residue management and to propose a crop residue management-bioeconomy model incorporating strategies to sustainably manage the crop residues through interventions that enable waste valorization, food and nutritional security, farmers’ livelihood and sustainable agricultural production system. A national inventory on crop residue burning including the pollutant species was prepared using the IPCC methodology. The crop types included for the estimation are cereals, pulses, oilseeds, sugarcane, cotton, jute and Mesta. The total amount of crop residues generated and burned for the year 2017–18 was estimated at 516 million tonnes and 116 million tonnes respectively. It is estimated that 116.3 Tg of crop residues burning released about 176.1 Tg of CO2, 10 Tg of CO, 313.9 Gg of CH4, 8.14 Gg of N2O, 151.14 Gg of NH3, 813.8 Gg of NMVOC, 453.4 Gg of PM2.5, and 935.9 Gg of PM10. The emission estimates can be a proxy to prepare the national level inventory of air pollutant species from crop residue burning. The crop residue management (CRM) demands a transition from the traditional zone of CRM to bioeconomy zone of CRM, wherein the interventions aim at the sustainability of agroecosystem. The proposed bioeconomy model has a four-pronged strategy that includes smart agriculture practices, waste bioeconomy involving aspirational principles of bioeconomy, capacity building of stakeholders’ and proactive government policy. Sustainable agricultural bioeconomy provides ample opportunities to reduce crop residue burning, increase farmers’ livelihood and decarbonize the agricultural production. India’s efforts and policies can provide lessons for other agricultural regions having similar environmental constraints.
Crop residues are sustainable feedstock for bioenergy production. The gross crop residue potential generated in India is 696.38 million tonnes/year. Cereal crops generate about 364.27 million tonnes/year of crop residues. Cereal crops (rice, wheat, sorghum, pearl millet, maize), sugarcane and horticultural crops (coconut, areca nut, banana) are found to have immense crop residue generation potential. Crop residues of 209.69 million tonnes/ year are available as surplus and can be explored for bioenergy generation. Cereals and sugarcane account for 75% of surplus crop residues. Spatial variations existing between states in terms of surplus crop residue generation are due to crop acreage and crop productivity. Uttar Pradesh generates 116.69 million tonnes/year of gross crop residues and 41.76 million tonnes/year of surplus crop residues. States like Punjab,
In the recent decades, cities have been expanding at a great pace which changes the landscape rapidly as a result of inflow of people from rural areas and economic progression. Therefore, understanding spatiotemporal dynamics of human induced land use land cover changes has become an important issue to deal with the challenges for making sustainable cities. This study aims to determine the rate of landscape transformations along with its causes and consequences as well as predicting urban growth pattern in Delhi and its environs. Landsat satellite images of 1989, 2000, 2010 and 2020 were used to determine the changes in land use land cover using supervised maximum likelihood classification. Subsequently, Land Change Modeler (LCM) module of TerrSet software was used to generate future urban growth for the year 2030 based on 2010 and 2020 dataset. Validation was carried out by overlaying the actual and simulated 2020 maps. The change detection results showed that urban and open areas increased by 13.44% and 2.40%, respectively, with a substantial decrease in crop land (10.88%) from 1989 to 2020 and forest area increased by 3.48% in 2020 due to restoration programmes. Furthermore, the simulated output of 2030 predicted an increase of 24.30% in urban area and kappa coefficient 0.96. Thus, knowledge of the present and predicted changes will help decision-makers and planners during the process of formulating new sustainable policies, master plans and economic strategies for rapidly growing cities with urban blue-green infrastructures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.