Denmark is taking aim at agricultural practices and land use, backed by $1.4 billion from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The so-called Green Denmark agreement between the Danish government, conservation groups, and agricultural and industrial sectors, launched in June, plans to facilitate a reorganization of land usage across the country to promote natural ecosystems and biodiversity. The Green Transition Plan includes a tax on livestock emissions — relevant as Denmark is a major producer and exporter of dairy, pork and young pigs — that would cost farmers around $95 per year per dairy cow, with rebates for those who follow climate-efficient practices.
Denmark is ramping up other initiatives to make its agricultural sector more sustainable and boost crop resilience to climate change. A crop-improvement project led by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist based at the Universities of Copenhagen and Cambridge, UK, will receive $83 million from the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the London-based Wellcome Trust to focus on environmental DNA —DNA fragments left by ancient organisms and isolated from sediments. The aim is to learn how ancestral crops, which had much more genetic diversity than modern varieties, adapted to past environmental challenges.
Meanwhile, Novo Holdings, the investment company of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, has acquired a 25% share of Sejet Plant Breeding, an agricultural company that develops crops including wheat, barley and maize (corn). The partnership will invest in technologies such as CRISPR-based editing to speed crop development for climate resilience and disease resistance. Although EU regulations currently limit the use of genomic techniques in farming, the European Parliament earlier this year voted to lessen the regulatory oversight of crops created through gene editing.
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World’s first tax on cows. Nat Biotechnol 42, 1161 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02367-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02367-0