Agricultural soil has great potential to address climate change issues, particularly the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. It offers effective remedies, such as increasing soil carbon content while lowering atmospheric carbon levels. The growing interest in inoculating soil with live microorganisms aims to enhance agricultural land carbon storage and sequestration capacity, modify degraded soil ecosystems, and sustain yields with fewer synthetic inputs. Agriculture has the potential to use soil microalgae as inoculants. However, the significance of these microorganisms in soil carbon sequestration and soil carbon stabilization under field conditions has yet to be fully understood. Large-scale commercial agriculture has focused on the development and use of inoculation products that promote plant growth, with a particular emphasis on enhancing yield attributes. Gaining more profound insights into soil microalgae’s role in soil carbon cycling is necessary to develop products that effectively support soil carbon sequestration and retention. This review comprehensively explores the direct and indirect mechanisms through which soil microalgae contribute to soil carbon sequestration, highlighting their potential as microbial inoculants in agricultural settings. This study underlines the need for more research to be conducted on microalgae inoculation into agricultural soil systems aimed at mitigating carbon emissions in the near future.

Although herbicides are essential for global agriculture and controlling weeds, they impact soil microbial communities and CO2 emissions. However, the effects of herbicides, tillage systems, and nitrogen fertilisation on CO2 emissions under different environmental conditions are poorly understood. This review explores how various agricultural practices and inputs affect CO2 emissions and addresses the impact of pest-management strategies, tillage systems, and nitrogen fertiliser usage on CO2 emissions using multiple databases. Key findings indicate that both increased and decreased tendencies in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were observed, depending on the herbicide type, dose, soil properties, and application methods. Several studies reported a positive correlation between CO2 emissions and increased agricultural production. Combining herbicides with other methods effectively controls emissions with minimal chemical inputs. Conservation practices like no-tillage were more effective than conventional tillage in mitigating carbon emissions. Integrated pest management, conservation tillage, and nitrogen fertiliser rate optimisation were shown to reduce herbicide use and soil greenhouse gas emissions. Fertilisers are similarly important; depending on the dosage, they may support yield or harm the soil. Fertiliser benefits are contingent on appropriate management practices for specific soil and field conditions. This review highlights the significance of adaptable management strategies that consider local environmental conditions and can guide future studies and inform policies to promote sustainable agriculture practices worldwide.

Microalgae hold significant potential as nature-based solutions in agriculture, offering benefits such as nitrogen fixation, enhanced nutrient cycling, stimulation of beneficial microbes, strengthening soil structure, and carbon sequestration. Yet, despite their potential, the role of microalgae, particularly through their interactions with soil systems, remains largely underexplored. Their ability to generate bioactive substances such as phytohormones, amino acids, and extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) fosters soil aggregation, nutrient availability, water retention, biological soil crust, and soil restoration, which ultimately supports plant growth and productivity. Moreover, the thermochemical conversion of microalgal biomass into biochar offers an effective strategy to improve carbon sequestration while simultaneously enriching soil nutrient content, thereby increasing crop productivity. While microalgae-based products often demonstrate strong efficacy under laboratory and greenhouse conditions, their performance in the field remains constrained by soil physicochemical properties, ecological incompatibility, competition with native microbial communities, and environmental variability, leading to inconsistent outcomes and highlighting the need for soil-specific, field-relevant strategies. Furthermore, the lack of standardized and cost-effective cultivation, formulation, and processing, along with low biomass yield and energy-intensive production, continues to limit their large-scale adoption in agricultural systems. Therefore, this narrative review aimed to discuss the mechanisms of coupling microalgal biomass and biochar to enhance soil health and crop growth, while also addressing field-performance constraints. It provides a balanced view of the potential and challenges of microalgae-based technologies for sustainable soil management and crop productivity. Overall, microalgae possess significant potential to improve soil health, increase crop yields, and contribute to sustainable agriculture that can withstand climate challenges.

Greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural crops remain a critical challenge for climate change mitigation. This review synthesizes evidence on cropland management interventions and global N2O mitigation potential. Agricultural practices such as cover cropping, agroforestry, reduced tillage, and diversification show promise in reducing CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions, yet uncertainties in measurement, verification, and socio-economic adoption persist. This review highlights that biochar application reduces N2O emissions by 16.2% (95% CI: 9.8–22.6%) in temperate systems, demonstrating greater consistency compared to no-till agriculture, which shows higher variability (11% reduction, 95% CI: −19% to +1%). Legume-based crop rotations reduce N2O emissions by up to 39% through improved nitrogen efficiency and increase soil organic carbon by up to 18%. However, reductions in synthetic fertilizer use (65% lower in legume vs. cereal systems) can be offset by the effects of biological nitrogen fixation. Optimized nitrogen fertilization, when combined with enhanced-efficiency fertilizers, can reduce N2O emissions by 55–64%. Complementing this, global-scale analysis underscores the dominant role of optimized nitrogen fertilization in curbing N2O emissions while sustaining yields. To bridge gaps between practice-level interventions and global emission dynamics, this paper introduces the ICEMF, a novel approach combining field-based management strategies with spatially explicit emission modeling. Realistic implementation currently achieves 25–35% of technical potential, but bundled interventions combining financial incentives, training, and institutional support can increase adoption to 40–60%, demonstrating ICEMF’s value through integrated, context-adapted approaches. Only peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1997 and 2025 were selected to ensure recent and reliable findings. This review highlights knowledge gaps, evaluates policy and technical trade-offs, and proposes ICEMF as a pathway toward scalable and adaptive mitigation strategies in agriculture.

Agriculture must balance productivity with greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, and resource concerns. This study examined how tillage (conventional, CT; minimum, MT), nitrogen fertilisation (0–221 kg N ha⁻¹), and herbicide rates (0–100%) interactively affected soil CO2 emissions, vegetation vigour, and weed diversity in maize production during 2022. A factorial experiment was conducted on a 1 ha with 40 plots monitored soil temperature, moisture, penetration resistance, normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), weed diversity (Simpson’s Index), and CO2 emissions (closed-chamber method). Minimum tillage increased soil water retention (9.3 ± 6.5% vs. 5.4 ± 4.3%), soil temperature (28.0 ± 1.5), and compaction (0.6 ± 0.3 vs. 0.1 ± 0.0 MPa), while enhancing weed diversity (0.53–0.80 vs. 0.38–0.67). MT produced higher CO2 emissions than CT, especially at 147 kg N ha⁻¹ (49.9 ± 15.7 vs. 29.1 ± 11.6 μmol m⁻² s⁻¹), peaking under MT-147 kg N ha⁻¹-H75 (79.4 ± 1.2 μmol m⁻² s⁻¹). NDVI responses varied between tillage systems; under CT, vegetation vigour peaked at 75% herbicide application, while under MT vegetation was more responsive to nitrogen and more sensitive to herbicide, highlighting nitrogen × herbicide interaction trade-offs. Overall, MT enhanced water conservation and weed diversity but increased short-term CO2 emissions. This study reports first-year, site-specific results from an ongoing multi-year field experiment; therefore, the findings were interpreted as short-term, season-specific responses. This highlights the need for site-specific, climate-smart management that integrates emissions, soil health, biodiversity, and productivity.