The regulator stated that farmland must be used only for agricultural purposes to qualify for government services, subsidies, and utilities.
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The Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA), the agricultural regulator for the emirate of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), announced a ban on using agricultural land for crypto mining.
Violators will face a 100,000 AED fine ($27,229), and the ADAFSA will suspend municipal services, confiscate mining hardware, and disconnect the farmland from the electrical grid, according to Tuesday’s .
ADAFSA said that using farmland for crypto mining conflicts with “sustainability” policies in the region and undermines existing land use provisions.
“Such activities fall outside the scope of permitted economic uses defined by the authority and are not allowed on farmlands,” it said.
Crypto mining and its environmental impact continue to be debated, with critics arguing that mining has negative effects on ecology, while advocates point to vertically integrated mining operations as a way to and siphon waste into utilities.
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Crypto mining is a highly competitive business with narrow profit margins, which encourages miners to to reduce variable expenses.
Renewable forms of energy like hydroelectric power, geothermal power, or runoff energy from industrial processes such as flaring excess energy from gas fields or siphoning methane energy from waste used to mine Bitcoin () in 2023.
In August 2024, researchers published a titled “An integrated landfill gas-to-energy and Bitcoin mining framework,” outlining how proof-of-work (PoW) mining can .
The researchers examined landfill-gas-to-energy (LFGTE) systems, which siphon methane gases from garbage in landfills to electricity, thereby sequestering the harmful greenhouse gas and keeping it out of the atmosphere.
These findings echo earlier research papers, including “Bitcoin and the Energy Transition: From Risk to Opportunity,” in 2023, which argued that mining could by 2030.
Despite this, critics continue to argue that . US lawmakers have made several attempts to get the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to pass regulations to restrict mining activity.
Such regulations include provisions to reduce pollution to the air, water, and greenhouse gas emissions under existing US regulations, alongside newer regulations targeting noise pollution from mining facilities.
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