To Truly Fight Poverty, Hunger and Climate Change, Sustainable Agriculture Must Go Global

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Authors: Nigel Sizer and Andre De Freitas | Published: December 29, 2016

The Paris Climate Agreement went into force on November 4, less than a year after 190 governments signed the landmark, legally binding international treaty. Ten days later, world leaders and civil society groups gathered at the COP22 climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco, to tackle the next phase—implementation—beginning with the development of concrete climate action plans.

Agriculture, which accounts for 25 to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (second only to the energy sector), is finally playing a starring role at the conference thanks to the treaty’s formal recognition of the critical interplay between agricultural expansion, deforestation and climate change.

“We must provide the necessary resources to support [climate] adaptation and encourage agriculture because it is one of the solutions to environmental problems,” said Dr. Jonathan Pershing, the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change.

Pershing’s statement is a harbinger that the innovative sustainability solutions advanced by the Rainforest Alliance and the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) for 30 years are finding more widespread acceptance in the agricultural sector. The ambitious agricultural agenda of COP22 is in fact well aligned with our decades of transformative work in agriculture, including the development of an effective and dynamic sustainability standard (the SAN Standard), the training of more than 1.4 million farmers in vulnerable landscapes around the world, and the building of sustainable commodity supply chains through our certification system. Since we are intimately acquainted with the nuts and bolts of this work, we also appreciate the reality check given by Pershing about the resources that will be required to support the world’s 570 million farmers on their journey to long-term sustainability.

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What the World Can Learn From SmartSOIL, a Research Project in the European Union

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Author: Joey DeMarco | Published: January 2017

The SmartSOIL (Sustainable farm management aimed at reducing threats to SOILs under climate change) project developed options to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) in Europe. It used meta-analyses of data from long-term experiments to model the impact of different farming practices on SOC. Unfortunately, studies have shown that individual farmers are often interested in short-term financial gains from increasing productivity and less concerned about the long-term sustainability of agricultural practices. Efforts to increase SOC is known as soil carbon sequestration.

A Sustainability article published in 2015 made the issue clear, “Soil degradation is not a theoretical problem; it is actively diminishing production capacity and compromising livelihoods at this very moment.” According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), one-third of the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of arable land is moderately or severely degraded, having lost either part of its structure or fertility. Soil resources are being over-exploited, degraded and irreversibly lost. Poor management practices, urbanization, industrial and mining activities, and land-use changes are causing this degradation. Further, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that converting natural ecosystems to agricultural plots has released roughly 66 billion tons of SOC from the ground since 1850.

SmartSOIL’s aim has been to reverse the current degradation trend of European soils. Agricultural practices that diminish SOC threaten soil functions and the surrounding ecosystem. Soil carbon sequestration has received increasing attention due to its ability to intake atmospheric carbon. The soil is an important part of the climate change conversation. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by nearly 40 percent since the start of the industrial era. A SmartSOIL deliverable states that on average, the calculated SOC balance on arable lands annually is negative 100 kg of carbon/hectare—a trend that needs to be reversed.

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Investigadores Apuestan por la Agricultura Regenerativa

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Autor: El Correo | Publicado: 11 octubre 2013

Conseguir unos pastos más sanos, fértiles y con mayor biodiversidad vegetal es el objetivo del proyecto LIFE Regen Farming, liderado por el Instituto Vasco de Investigación y Desarrollo Agrario, NEIKER-Tecnalia. La iniciativa se marca como finalidad identificar, demostrar y transferir la mejores prácticas de manejo para los pastizales y proponer a ganaderos y agricultores técnicas de agricultura regenerativa que permitan una gestión más eficaz y sostenible de los suelos.

La búsqueda de una mayor producción agrícola y ganadera ha hecho que los suelos en los que se asientan los pastos estén sometidos a prácticas de producción intensiva que reducen su calidad y sostenibilidad. Para buscar soluciones a este problema, NEIKER-Tecnalia propone testar cinco líneas básicas de actuación basadas en la agricultura regenerativa: eliminar pesticidas, herbicidas y abonos químicos; utilizar abonos orgánicos; llevar a cabo siembras directas en los pastos; usar especies herbáceas perennes, y un pastoreo dirigido de los rebaños. Estas nuevas prácticas serán sometidas a ensayo en los próximos tres años con el fin de determinar su viabilidad desde el punto de vista medioambiental y económico.

La práctica conocida como siembra directa se lleva a cabo mediante pequeños agujeros en el suelo, en los que extienden las semillas. Este método evita hacer los surcos que convencionalmente se hacen en agricultura, que erosionan el suelo del pastizal. Por su parte, el uso de especies herbáceas perennes permite que la hierba dure más años, lo que preserva la integridad del suelo durante más tiempo.

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For Carbon Sequestration, ARPA-E Banks $35 Million on the Crops of the Future

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Author: Tina Casey | Published: December 19, 2017 

The Energy Department is out with another $35 million in funding for its aptly named ROOTS carbon sequestration program, aimed at developing and deploying new crops that can solve at least two big problems at once. The crops of the future will be able to sequester carbon at a greater depth, increasing accumulation by about 50%. The new crops will also help restore soil quality, enabling farmers to sustain higher yields while — hopefully — reducing reliance on fertilizers.

ROOTS (Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration) comes under the Energy Department’s cutting edge funding agency, ARPA-E. That adds a high tech twist to the act of plugging plants into the soil.

Reducing The Agriculture Soil Carbon Debt

The issue of soil “carbon debt” in the US agriculture industry hasn’t crossed the CleanTechnica radar yet, so here’s a brief explainer from the Energy Department outlining the scope of the problem:

While advances in technology have resulted in a ten-fold increase in crop productivity over the past hundred years, soil quality has declined, incurring a soil carbon debt equivalent to 65 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)…

Ouch!

The decline in soil quality creates a ripple effect that hampers the ability of the US agriculture industry to grow (so to speak lols) in a low carbon economy:

…The soil carbon debt also increases the need for costly nitrogen fertilizer, which has become the primary source of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, a greenhouse gas. The soil carbon debt also impacts crop water use, increasing susceptibility to drought stress, which threatens future productivity.

One particularly cost-effective solution, according to ARPA-E scientists (are you listening Rick Perry?) is to focus new crops on root systems that leverage the “photosynthetic bridge” linking plants, microbes and soil with atmospheric carbon.

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Eat the Vote

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Author: Stett Holbrook | Published: December 21, 2016 

Eating is a political act, so says Michael Pollan, in that it offers three opportunities a day to choose what kind of food system you want, even more if you’re really hungry. That sentiment takes on new significance as a KFC-loving proto-fascist is about to take office in Washington.

As of this writing, Donald Trump has yet to name his nominee for secretary of agriculture, which says something about how much importance he places on the position. There have been a few names bandied about, but I’ll go out on a limb and say whoever gets tapped for the job will be a staunch defender of oil-addicted Big Ag and factory farms and no friend of small, regional farms, the likes of which help define the North Bay and support its rural economy.

While current Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has helped increase funding for the organic industry and provided more support for vegetable growers of all types, America’s food industry and the farm bill that drives it is still dominated by fat-cat commodity farmers and the lobbyists and Farm Belt politicians who do their bidding. That’s not about to change, and the gains made by sustainable agriculture in the North Bay and beyond will need more politically motivated eaters than ever.

Michelle Obama’s organic garden on the White House south lawn will be hard to remove because it was recently fortified with cement, stone and steel, but don’t get too attached to it. As a fan of McDonald’s, and with the belly to prove it, Trump will probably not eat much produce from the garden. Replacing the garden (which reportedly produced 2,000 pounds of produce a year for the White House kitchen and local food banks) with an artificial grass putting green would be much more his style.

To be sure, shopping at the farmers market, buying organic lettuce and growing your own food is not going to starve the beast that is Trump. But it’s a good place to start and one of the better-tasting forms of protest available for those who want to defend a host of social, economic and environmental goods produced by an environmentally sound local agriculture.

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2016 Quietly Ushered in a New Global Era in Climate and Land Use

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Author: Jason Funk | Published: December 27, 2016

Future historians may look back at 2016 as a year that marked a significant shift in the land sector, leading to the acceleration of carbon sequestration around the world. It confirmed and widened the opportunities for countries to sequester carbon through better management of forests, croplands, pastures, and wetlands, while adding to the urgency of this opportunity as a key element of our efforts to prevent disruptive climate change. Fortunately, many countries have begun to take action at a large scale, and others are learning from their examples. At the same time, new resources to spur sequestration are being mobilized at an unprecedented scale. Although the year might be characterized as one of preparation and cultivation, rather than tangible, high-profile outcomes, the seeds of 2016 promise to bear significant fruit in the years ahead.

Global momentum on enhancing forest carbon is unleashed

After years of negotiations, the global climate community has aligned behind efforts to protect and restore forests, which have enormous potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Building on initiatives like the Bonn Challenge, the Warsaw Framework for REDD+, and the New York Declaration on Forests, 2015 concluded with worldwide consensus in the Paris Agreement that “Parties [to the Agreement] should take action to conserve and enhance, as appropriate, sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases,” including “biomass, forests and oceans as well as other terrestrial, coastal and marine ecosystems.” In 2016, we saw many countries begin to act on this commitment, individually and collectively, with a proliferation of new plans and policies, fueled by growing investments and practical science. More than 120 countries included forests in their commitments, with activities ranging from afforestation in Afghanistan to sustainable forest management in Zambia.

Many countries were already taking action toward reducing emissions from deforestation and enhancing forest carbon sinks, and 2016 gave them an opportunity to secure the gains they had made. For example, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Malaysia have each built a solid foundation for action in forests, by 1) developing monitoring systems that can track fluctuations in emissions from forests, 2) initiating processes for consultation with stakeholders, and 3) establishing official baselines for tracking progress, which have been reviewed by international experts. In 2016, we saw further progress, with nearly a dozen countries submitting forest baselines for formal review – as well as development of recommendations for how to make this process more accessible and streamlined, generated by an expert dialogue in which I played a role as a facilitator and co-author. These baselines and the associated accounting systems, used to track progress, are crucial early steps that set the stage for forest countries to secure financial support and implement policies that can build up forest carbon.

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How to Save Forests? Run Them Like a Business, Says This Former Wall Street Man

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Author: Carolyn Beeler | Published: December 28, 2016 

The sun is just starting to dip toward the horizon in Indonesian Borneo, and Dharsono Hartono is standing on a fire tower, looking out over a peat forest falling into shadow.

Hartono knows that all over Indonesia, this carbon-rich type of forest is being burned or cleared for palm oil or paper pulp plantations.

But when he looks down from the fire tower with his businessman’s eye, Hartono is more interested in the soil than anything he could plant in it.

“Unlike the typical mineral soil,” Hartono says, “peat soil is actually dead wood, leaves and logs that become part of the soil.”

The layers of wood and decomposing leaves create a forest floor so thick it bounces when Hartono steps on it.

All those decomposing plants contain lots of carbon, which means peat forests store more greenhouse gases than a regular tropical rainforest.

If the forest in front of Hartono were converted to plantations like much of Borneo already has been, tons of carbon would be freed from the soil and released into the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming.

“It would emit about 6 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent,” Hartono says. “Which is in this case close to about 5 million cars a year.”

Hartono’s job is to prevent that from happening. And to make sure his company turns a profit along the way.

He is the CEO and co-founder of the Katingan Project, which manages 600 square miles of land in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan.

The project aims to protect the peat forest, then sell carbon credits based on the amount of greenhouse gasses they can keep sequestered in the ground.

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COP 13 En Cancún, ¿Compromisos Alcanzables?

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Autor: Luisa Montes| Publicado: 24 diciembre 2016

Finalmente con mariachis y a la 5 de la mañana acabó la 13ª Conferencia de las partes del Convenio de Diversidad Biológica (COP 13) en Cancún que se llevo a cabo el 4 al 17 de diciembre, y a la cual asistieron más de 6,500 delegados de 196 países que participaron en el diálogo, incluyendo a expertos, autoridades y sociedad civil.

¿Qué se logró en tantos días y con tanta inversión que realizamos tú y yo con el dinero de nuestros impuestos? Que por cierto no fue barato tener el Moon Palace rentado al 100% para la conferencia durante casi 20 días. Pero como bien preguntaba Paco Gil a sus alumnos de economía en el ITAM: ¿eso fue un gasto o una inversión? Pues no lo sabremos hasta saber qué provecho sacamos de todo ello.

OPINIÓN: 5 causas de la crisis alimentaria mundial

Empecemos por revisar los principales resultados de la COP, el objetivo de la Cumbre era integrar la biodiversidad para el bienestar en particular en los sectores de agricultura, forestal, pesca y turismo, ya que son estos sectores los que más dependen de la naturaleza. Los ministros de estas cuatro secretarías se comprometieron a trabajar intersectorialmente para contribuir a su protección y conservación.

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Earthworms Do Double-duty at Fetzer Vineyards

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Author: Robin Shreeves | Published: December 25, 2016 

Last month, I had the privilege of moderating a panel at the Net Impact Conference on sustainability in the beverage industry. Encouraging information was shared that day about how the wine, beer and spirits industries are working together on issues like supply chain sustainability and responsible, recyclable packaging.

Josh Prigge, director of regenerative development at Fetzer Vineyards, was one of my panelists. As he was telling the audience about some of Fetzer’s specific sustainable initiatives, two things caught my attention: his use of the term “regenerative sustainability” and the winery’s new regenerative, wastewater decontamination process that uses earthworms.

I wanted to know more, so I spent some time talking to Prigge about how they both play out at Fetzer.

What is regenerative sustainability?

“We’ve really been trying to lead the way for sustainability in the wine industry,” Prigge said. “We have been for decades. In the ’80s we went 100 percent organic with grapes. In the ’90s we were the first to use 100 percent renewable energy. We were also the first to report and track greenhouse gas emissions.”

All of those practices are considered sustainable, but Fetzer Vineyards wanted to go further.

“Over the past couple of years our corporate strategy has been to move beyond sustainability and become regenerative,” Prigge said. “Instead of just trying to reduce negative impacts, we try to create positive impacts.”

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