Basso Lab Tackles Agricultural Emissions with Climate TRACE

July 10, 2025

As part of an ongoing series, Climate TRACE has been interviewing individual coalition members about their work. They recently talked with Professor Bruno Basso, who supports Climate TRACE’s work on modeling agricultural emissions.

Dr. Basso emphasizes the critical role of agriculture in climate change — as both a major emitter and a potential climate solution. Agriculture contributes 10–12% of global greenhouse gas emissions directly, and up to 24% when including land use changes. The most potent emission is nitrous oxide (N₂O), released from nitrogen fertilizers, which is 300 times more powerful than CO₂.

To better understand and reduce these emissions, Dr. Basso and his team — graduate student Prateek Sharma and lab members Aditya Manuraj and Rajvi Trivedi — developed a novel global methodology to estimate fertilizer use and N₂O emissions across 132 crops using crop modeling and satellite remote sensing. Their approach helps fill data gaps where traditional AI methods fail, by simulating daily crop-soil interactions with the SALUS model, a crop simulation tool Basso co-developed.

This model powers both academic research and commercial tools for companies like Nestlé and Land O' Lakes, enabling real-time predictions of how fertilizer use affects yield and emissions. The team is now building an AI-powered decision tool — like a ChatGPT for agriculture — to help farmers simulate "what if" scenarios and guide sustainable practices.

Their recent work, in collaboration with Climate TRACE and Carbon Yield’s Sam Schiller, maps emissions trends by crop and country from 2005 to 2020, revealing which regions are improving efficiency (more yield, fewer emissions) and which are not. Dr. Basso hopes this data will empower both farmers and policymakers to make informed decisions that reduce emissions while supporting food production.

Read the full interview on the Climate Trace website.