Landscapes That Work for Biodiversity and People

/by

BACKGROUND

Biodiversity is under siege, with greatly enhanced rates of local and global extinction and the decline of once-abundant species. Current rates of human-induced climate change and land use forecast the Anthropocene as one of the most devastating epochs for life on earth. How do we handle the Anthropocene’s triple challenge of preventing biodiversity loss, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and sustainably providing resources for a growing human population? The answer is in how we manage Earth’s “working lands”; that is, farms, forests, and rangelands. These lands must be managed both to complement the biodiversity conservation goals of protected areas and to maintain the diverse communities of organisms, from microbes to mammals, that contribute to producing food, materials, clean water, and healthy soils; sequestering greenhouse gases; and buffering extreme weather events, functions that are essential for all life on Earth.

Photo credit: Pexels

ADVANCES

Protected areas are the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation.

KEEP READING ON SCIENCE

To Address the Climate Crisis, We Must Completely Rethink How We Produce and Consume Food

/by

The clock on climate upheaval is ticking fast with little time to lose, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made frighteningly clear last week. “Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” the October 8 report warned. Yet just one month earlier, the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS) brushed over what may be the most critical “aspect of society,” making only marginal mention of the crisis’s top cause.

Photo credit: Pexels

Tucked away in a pastry-laden conference room in a downtown San Francisco office building, a “high-level roundtable” of international leaders discussed something pivotal to the fate of the planet yet sidelined by the summit: food and agriculture.

Led by New Zealand’s ambassador to the United States, Tim Groser, and top representatives from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Resources Institute and others, the roundtable posed the challenge, “How can we make agricultural climate action more attractive?”

Food and agriculture represents the single-biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions—at between 19 and 29 percent including associated deforestation, more than any other sector in the global economy. Yet, “agriculture is always the last at the party,” noted Groser, former chair of the World Trade Organization agriculture negotiations process, during the roundtable. Other GCAS panels explored issues of deforestation, land use and food production systems—but these pivotal issues were largely absent from the summit’s main stage events, and were barely mentioned in the protests and teach-ins surrounding the summit.

The roundtable, hosted by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, featured a dissonant blend of urgency and lack of clarity: There was no consensus around how to rapidly reduce food’s greenhouse gas emissions, which stem chiefly from industrial agriculture’s removal of forests and other carbon sinks, alongside ballooning meat and dairy production. Livestock production alone spews 14.5 percent of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

A failing food system

“The way we produce food is failing us,” said Zitouni Ould Dada, deputy director of the UN FAO’s climate and environment division, in an interview after the event. “The whole system of land use has to change. We need to produce food with the land we have.”

The roundtable raised a host of food and climate crises and challenges:

  • In a survey of 174 countries by the World Resources Institute, just nine had targets for reducing methane emissions from their food production.
  • Despite heaps of evidence showing industrial livestock is a top climate threat, global meat and dairy production and consumption continue to soar.
  • Massive food waste is a major hunger and climate problem: according to the UN FAO, a full one-third of all food is wasted or lost, and “if food wastage were a country, it would be the third largest emitting country in the world.”

As the FAO’s Dada explained, “We are trying to get production to shift toward efficiency because we know there is so much food wastage, from the time you sow the food to the time you have it on your plate,” including long-distance transportation, storage and processing. “Instead of producing more, we can produce more efficiently.”

The roundtable clarified a key dilemma: with nations dependent on trade, exports and economic development to maintain economic growth—and that growth invariably spurring greater meat consumption—how can countries fill their economic coffers while slashing food-related emissions?

As the world’s top exporter of goat and sheep meat, and a major beef producer, New Zealand illustrates this tension between trade and emissions reduction. The far-flung island nation faces a “very acute problem when it comes to our emissions program,” Groser acknowledged.

But, with global meat consumption rising and livestock’s climate hoof-print clear, how would top beef exporters reduce their climate harm while maintaining income for those nations and their farmers? When this reporter posed the question to the roundtable, Groser dodged the core challenge of production and consumption. “Production is not the problem,” he responded. “The problem is the how, the sustainability of production.”

While debate persists between better meat and no meat, more sustainable ranching has been on the rise, including grass-fed, smaller-scale and rotational grazing systems. Scientists and activists continue to debate the emissions reductions and carbon storage potential of these alternatives, but there is little question that producing and consuming less livestock would reduce food’s climate impact.

Unfortunately, the big picture of meat and dairy is grim. Global per capita meat consumption continues to rise (with the United States and other industrial “developed” nations leading the way)—and with it comes climate-wrecking deforestation, along with methane and nitrous oxide emissions.

When asked about using national policy such as subsidies or other incentives to propel more sustainable food production, the roundtable offered meager response. Groser said there are efforts in that direction, but he stressed the contradiction of governments trying to price carbon in the marketplace while also subsidizing carbon production.

For Groser, the dilemma exemplifies “the enormous sensitivity of agriculture” in climate reduction, particularly for nations that rely on agriculture and exports to survive. According to the EPA, agriculture comprises 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—though given farming’s relatively small chunk of the U..S economy, “it is a disproportionately GHG-intensive activity,” the USDA Economic Research Service has noted. New Zealand, meanwhile, generates half of its emissions from agriculture, Ireland 30 percent, France 20 percent, and Uruguay around 80 percent, according to Groser. “There’s no incentive structure for anyone to worry about agriculture other than France, Ireland and New Zealand.”

Like the summit itself, the roundtable focused far more on market-driven approaches than on how governments can regulate or fundamentally change the market systems that require relentless growth and profits. Gail Work, CEO of One Earth Ventures, touted lab research suggesting “we can increase the size of cows and the volume of milk while reducing pollution.” Manish Bapna, executive vice president of the World Resources Institute, emphasized using “market forces” to sway corporate supply chains to address deforestation—but, he added, “what we’ve seen is not nearly enough progress.” Any notion of the public sector spurring or supporting more rapid change was missing from the roundtable conversation.

As the latest IPCC report spells out, aggressively tackling the climate crisis would have “clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems,” and “could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society.” While given short shrift by the climate summit and the movement  protests surrounding it, critical efforts are afoot to shrink food’s outsized role in climate change. From institutions such as schools and hospitals reducing their meat consumption, to global farmer movements pushing agroecology farming systems that boost resiliency while reducing emissions, there are signs of hope.

The chief question is whether this progress can be radically and rapidly expanded.  For that to happen, the issue must be more heartily embraced by high-profile climate summits, world governments and the climate movement, as a central component of both the crisis and its solutions.

Reposted with permission from Common Dreams.

Capturing Co2 from Air: To Keep Global Warming under 1.5°c, Emissions Must Go Negative, Ipcc Says

/by

The UN’s latest global warming report made it clear that if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, society urgently needs to move away from fossil fuels completely.

Photo credit: Pexels

But to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report says, we’ll also have to figure out how to undo some of the damage that’s already been done.

“Given our current knowledge, we can’t get to 1.5 degrees without removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute.

With 1.5°C of warming just around the corner, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) considered several solutions for removing CO2 from the air—some as simple as planting more trees, others as complex as using technology to filter CO2 from the air. Their practicality and their risks vary considerably.

KEEP READING ON INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS

 

Regeneration International Founding Member Receives Lifetime Ashoka Fellowship

/by

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 15, 2018

Contact:
Regeneration International: Katherine Paul, 207.653 3090, katherine@regenerationinternational.org

Ashoka: Amy Clark, 202.365.3452, aclark@ashoka.org

Regeneration International Founding Member Receives Lifetime Ashoka Fellowship

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin One of 11 Social Innovators Awarded Prestigious Fellowship in 2018

MINNEAPOLIS – Regeneration International (RI) announced today that Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, founding and steering committee member, has been awarded a lifetime Ashoka Fellowship.

“This award is well deserved,” said Andre Leu, international director of RI. “Reginaldo has developed a unique regenerative poultry and agroforestry system that can used by small scale farmers around the world to take them out of poverty, produce high quality food and improve the environment. We hope that the recognition that comes with this award will assist in the scaling up of these important regenerative farming systems.”

Haslett-Marroquin said: “The Ashoka Fellowship comes at a time when I have personally struggled to find a crack in the wall of systems change, it opens a huge gap in it, sufficiently big to walk myself, my team and partners into a world of new possibilities, with less stress, with a world community and ecosystem of people also bent on changing the world, I feel blessed and fortunate to have this opportunity, I look forward to using it to expanding our collective capacity to draw down carbon, cool the planet, feed people healthy foods, and help bring back some dignity and purpose to the time honored profession of farming.”

Simon Stumpf, Director of Venture and Fellowship at Ashoka, said: “This group of Ashoka Fellows reminds us that even our most complex and tangled social challenges are solvable. Among these new Fellows are innovators transforming our food system, criminal justice system, workforce development sector, even the funeral industry. These people show us how to champion real, transformative change in a world that needs it.”

Ashoka evaluates more than 500 promising nominations every year in the United States and conducts hundreds of hours of in-person interviews before selecting Ashoka Fellows. This year’s Fellows come from small towns and urban centers all across the country. With creativity and commitment, they tackle complex challenges, imagine a new way forward and build it for everyone, for the good of all. They forge partnerships and pathways for everyone—all ages, backgrounds, walks of life—to contribute fully as changemakers.

Haslett-Marroquin is the principal architect of the poultry-centered regenerative agriculture model promoted by the Main Street Project, and which serves as the cornerstone of his work on behalf of RI, He also directs the Regeneration Agriculture Alliance, a platform designed for building regenerative agriculture support infrastructure. A native of Guatemala, Haslett-Marroquin, who lives in Northfield, Minnesota, earned his agronomy degree from the Central National School of Agriculture in Guatemala, and degrees in international business administration and communications from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Twin Cities International Citizens of the Year (1996), and the Northfield, Minnesota, Service to Mankind Award (SERTOMA), 2008. He serves on several nonprofit boards, including the Conservation Core of Minnesota and Iowa. Haslett-Marroquin is a founding member of Regeneration International and Regeneration Guatemala. He was appointed to the RI steering committee in 2017. He is the author of “In the Shadow of Green Man.”

The other 2018 Ashoka Fellows are: Brandon Dennison, Coalfield Development, Wayne, West Virginia; Erica Gerrity, Ostara Initiative, Viroqua, Wisconsin; Jess Ladd, Callisto, San Francisco, California; Kara Bobroff, NACA Inspired Schools Network, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Katrina Spade, Recompose, Seattle, Washington; Lam Ho, Community Activism Law Alliance, Chicago, Illinois; Molly Burhans, Goodlands, New Haven, Connecticut; Rachel Armstrong, Farm Commons, Duluth, Minnesota; and Steve Miller, HBCU Truth & Reconciliation Oral History Project, Henderson, Texas.

Regeneration International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to promoting, facilitating and accelerating the global transition to regenerative food, farming and land management for the purpose of restoring climate stability, ending world hunger and rebuilding deteriorated social, ecological and economic systems. More here. https://regenerationinternational.org/.

For 35 years, Ashoka has pioneered social entrepreneurship, an entire field dedicated to fostering energetic problem-solving right in the communities where the problems exist. Through its time-tested growth platform, it finds, vets, and supports thousands of leading changemakers in the United States and around the world. More here.  https://www.ashoka-usa.org

Navdanya Farm Hosts Third RI General Assembly in India

/by

“Regenerative Agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy.” Vandana Shiva

Thirty eight representatives from more than thirty organizations met at Dr. Shiva’s Navdanya Farm to network and explore next steps for Regeneration International, a cooperative of stake holders committed to promoting small scale organic farming as a solution to climate change.

The meetings began with introductions and short presentations about each participant’s work, which ranges from soil science to filmmaking. The group represented seventeen countries from Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as North, South and Central America.

The diversity of the groups’ roots was fitting, given that many participants attended the International Biodiversity Conference that took place at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun over three days before.

After introductions, there were more in-depth reports from Belize,

Brazil, India, Kenya, Lesotho, Mexico, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Tanzania, United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

There was much interest in each region’s various strategies and challenges. One benefit of the meeting was the opportunity for the different countries to come together and share information about their work, that has a little-known but profoundly positive impact on climate change.

In the spirit of action and inspiration, Becket Films screened a soon-to-be finished cut of The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, a documentary about Dr. Shiva’s life of activism for a regenerative and peaceful world.

The next part of the meeting centered on strategies for the future and how the Regeneration International network can scale up and support the work of its members.

First there was clarification of the mission: Regeneration International exists to promote the message and practice of organic food, fiber and farming that regenerates the environment, the climate and human communities. This means that the regeneration is inclusive of partners working with nature to restore the health and biodiversity of soil, seed, water, land, food and fiber in ways that also supports the rights and welfare of small farmers, women, the indigenous, and other minorities.

There was consensus to use the film, The Seeds of Vandana Shiva as a tool for education, outreach and fundraising for our affiliate groups.

The meeting looked forward to UNFCC COP25, scheduled to take place in Brazil in November 2019 where participants decided the next international gathering of Regeneration International partners should take place. Despite the 4/1000 initiative that was signed at COP15, the issue of agriculture and food systems is still fundamentally ignored by the COP and the climate movement. For this reason it is Regeneration International’s agenda at COP25 to bring greater attention to the issue of small scale organic food and farming as a solution for climate change.

The meeting concluded with resolutions to deepen relationships, to continue to share experiences and information, to support and broadcast partners’ initiatives, and to work together on planning for COP25.

Reversing Climate Change through Regenerative Agriculture

/by

This year’s Acres U.S.A. Conference features numerous speakers, who can show how we can reverse the disruptive effects climate change by adopting best practice regenerative production systems. These systems will also make our farms and ranches more productive and resilient to the current erratic climate disruption that we are all facing.

The increasing erratic and disruptive weather events caused by climate change are the greatest immediate threat to viable farming and food security. We are already being adversely affected by the longer and more frequent droughts, and irregular, out-of-season and destructive rainfall events.

The world is already around 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) warmer than the industrial revolution. The energy needed to heat the atmosphere by 1.8 degrees is equivalent to billions of atomic bombs. I am using this violent metaphor so that people can understand how much energy is being released into our atmosphere and oceans and why we will get more frequent and stronger storms wreaking havoc in our communities.

This extra energy is violently fueling and disrupting our weather systems. It means storms are far more intense. Winter storms will be colder and can be pushed further south and north than normal due to this energy. Similarly, summer storms, especially hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, typhoons, tropical lows, etc., are far more intense with deluging destructive rainfall.

Droughts are more frequent and are resulting more frequent and damaging forest and grass fires that are changing the ecology due to not allowing time for recovery. The current intense northern hemisphere heatwave, global drought and unprecedented number of ferocity of forests fires are being exacerbated by climate change.

The frequency and intensity of these types of events will only get exponentially worse when the world warms to 3.6 degrees, which is the upper limit that the Paris climate meeting agreed to.

Some people don’t really care if the world is 3.6 degrees warmer — however it is not the average temperatures that are the concern, but rather the regular extremes, especially the out-of-season heatwaves and rain events, that we are experiencing now.

Managing Climate Change Now

Atmospheric CO2 levels have been increasing at 2 parts per million (ppm) per year. The level of CO2 reached a new record of 400 ppm in May 2016. This is the highest level of CO2 in the atmosphere for 800,000 years. However, in 2016, despite all the commitments countries made in Paris in December 2015, the levels of CO2 increased at record levels in 2016 (3.3 ppm of CO2 entered the atmosphere, creating a new record).

According to the World Meteorological Organization, “Geological records show that the current levels of CO2 correspond to an ‘equilibrium’ climate last observed in the mid-Pliocene (3-5 million years ago), a climate that was 2-3 °C (3.6 – 5.4° F) warmer, where the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melted and even some of the East Antarctic ice was lost, leading to sea levels that were 10-20 meters (30-60 feet) higher than those today.”

Global sea level rises will cause the atoll island countries, large parts of Bangladesh, Netherlands, coastal United States, New York, New Orleans, Miami, San Francisco/Bay Area, London, Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta, Shanghai, Singapore, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and other low lying areas to go under water

Even if the world transitioned to 100 percent renewable energy tomorrow, this will not stop the temperature and sea level rises because it will take more than 100 years for the CO2levels to drop. These sea level rises will cause a huge refugee crisis for over a billion people by 2050 and throw our planet into chaos. The world cannot cope with 2 million refugees from Syria. How do we cope hundreds of millions of climate change refugees? There will be wars over food, water and land.

The fact is we have to speed up the transition to renewable energy and we have to make a great effort to draw down the CO2 in the atmosphere.

The Solution Is Under Our Feet!

In order to stop the present increase in atmospheric CO2, agricultural systems would have to sequester 2.3 ppm of CO2 per year. Using the accepted formula that 1 ppm CO2 = 7.76 Gt CO2 means that 17.85 Gt of CO2 per year needs to be sequestered from the atmosphere and stored in the soil as soil organic carbon (SOC).

Stopping the increase in GHGs and then reducing them must be the first priority, and this should be non-negotiable. Moving to renewable energy and energy efficiency will not be enough to stop the planet from warming over the next hundred years and going into damaging climate change. The amount of 405 ppm is past the level needed to meet the Paris objective of limiting the temperature increase to +1.5/2°C (2.7/3.6° F). The levels need to be well below 350 ppm. The excess CO2 must be sequestered from the atmosphere to stop damaging climate change.

Soils are the greatest carbon sink after the oceans. There is a wide variability in the estimates of the amount of carbon stored in the soils globally. According to Professor Rattan Lal, there are over 2,700 gigatons (Gt) of carbon stored in soils. The soil holds more carbon than the atmosphere (848 Gt) and biomass (575 Gt) combined. There is already an excess of carbon in the oceans that is starting cause a range of problems. We cannot put any more CO2 in the atmosphere or the oceans. Soils are the logical sink for carbon.

Most agricultural systems lose soil carbon with estimates that agricultural soils have lost 50-70 percent of their original SOC pool, and the depletion is exacerbated by further soil degradation and desertification. Agricultural systems that recycle organic matter and use crop rotations can increase the levels of SOC. This is achieved through techniques such as longer rotations, ground covers, cover crops, green manures, legumes, compost, organic mulches, biochar, perennials, agro-forestry, agroecological biodiversity and livestock on pasture using sustainable grazing systems such as holistic grazing. These systems are starting to come under the heading of “regenerative agriculture” because they regenerate SOC.

Regenerative Agriculture Potential

BEAM (Biologically Enhanced Agricultural Management), is a process developed by Dr. David Johnson of New Mexico State University, that uses compost with a high diversity of soil microorganisms. BEAM has achieved very high levels of sequestration. According to Johnson et al., “… a 4.5 year agricultural field study promoted annual average capture and storage of 10.27 metric tons soil C ha-1 year -1 while increasing soil macro-, meso- and micro-nutrient availability offering a robust, cost-effective carbon sequestration mechanism within a more productive and long-term sustainable agriculture management approach.” These results have since been replicated in other trials.

Soil Organic Carbon x 3.67 = CO2 which means that 10.27 metric tons soil C ha-1 year -1 = 37.7 metric tons of CO2 per hectare per year. (38,000 pounds of CO2 per acre per year – close enough)

If BEAM was extrapolated globally across agricultural lands it would sequester 184 Gt of CO2/yr.

Regenerative Grazing

The Savory Institute, Gabe Brown and many others have been scaling up holistic management systems on every arable continent. There is now a considerable body of published science and evidence-based practices showing that these systems regenerate degraded lands, improve productivity, water holding capacity and soil carbon levels.

Nearly 70 percent of the world’s agricultural lands are used for grazing. The published evidence is showing that correctly managed pastures can build up SOC faster than many other agricultural systems and that it is stored deeper in the soil.

Research by Machmuller et al. 2015: “In a region of extensive soil degradation in the southeastern United States, we evaluated soil C accumulation for 3 years across a 7-year chronosequence of three farms converted to management-intensive grazing. Here we show that these farms accumulated C at 8.0 Mg ha−1 yr−1, increasing cation exchange and water holding capacity by 95 percent and 34 percent, respectively.”

To explain the significance of these figures: 8.0 Mg ha−1 yr−1 = 8,000 kgs of carbon being stored in the soil per hectare per year. Soil Organic Carbon x 3.67 = CO2, means that these grazing systems have sequestered 29,360 kgs (29.36 metric tons) of CO2/ ha/yr.

If these regenerative grazing practices were implemented on the world’s grazing lands they would sequester 98.5 gt CO2 per year.

Conclusion

Just transitioning 10-20 percent of agricultural production to best practice regenerative systems will sequester enough CO2 to reverse climate change and restore the global climate. Regenerative agriculture can change agriculture from being a major contributor to climate change to becoming a major solution. The widespread adoption of these systems should be made the highest priority by farmers, ranchers, governments, international organizations, industry and climate change organizations.

André Leu is international director of Regeneration International. He is a longtime farmer in Australia and past president of the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements. He is the author of The Myths of Safe Pesticides and Poisoning Our Children, published by Acres U.S.A.

Recuperan suelos en La Toglla usando ramas de los árboles

/by

Publicado por: El Universo

La Toglla, una comunidad ancestral de 700 habitantes, que ocupa 551 hectáreas en las faldas del Ilaló, en la parroquia Guangopolo del cantón Quito, impulsa el proyecto “Diseño y puesta en marcha de una nueva estrategia de Agradación de suelos y ambiente en el Ilaló”.

El objetivo es tener 15 hectáreas reforestadas y que en tres años la cangahua tenga una capa arable y cultivable para sembrar.

Hemos cedido una hectárea y media para sembrar penco y entre cada penco, sembraremos guarango. Con el penco se obtiene el mishqui, chaguarmishqui y todos sus derivados y con el guarango un pigmento para los artesanos que trabajan en cuero. El guarango es un espino, una leguminosa que ayuda a descompactar el suelo, cuenta. Con el Gobierno de la provincia buscamos sembrar y promocionar el mishqui (tequila) como bebida símbolo de la provincia, dice Jaime Paucar, presidente del Consejo de Gobierno de la Comunidad La Toglla.

LEER MÁS AQUÍ