Professor Deli Chen

Meeting the world’s growing food and energy needs while minimising nitrogen’s negative impacts is one of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st century. Over the past century, the world’s population has increased four-fold. We all need to eat and more than half of us eat food grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. There’s also nitrogen produced as a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial processes.

Nitrogen pollution has significant environmental and human health costs. Yet it is often conflated with other environmental problems, such as climate change, which is exacerbated by nitrous oxide (N₂O) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), or particulate smog, to which ammonia (NH₃) also contributes. One way to understand our nitrogen use is to look at our nitrogen footprint.

China is the world’s largest consumer of agrochemicals, using more than 30 per cent of global fertilisers and pesticides on only nine percent of the world’s cropland. This has caused enormous damage to the environment and to human health locally, regionally and globally.