Time to Act on Water Scarcity

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Published: January 20, 2017 

Growing water scarcity is now one of the leading challenges for sustainable development, and that challenge is poised to intensify as the world’s population continues to swell and climate change intensifies, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva warned today.

Competition for water will intensify as humanity’s numbers exceed 9 billion people around 2050 — already, millions of family farmers in developing countries suffer from lack of access to freshwater, while conflicts over water resources already surpass those tied to land disputes in some regions, he noted in remarks made at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (19-21 January) in Berlin.

Additionally, climate change is already altering hydrological regimes everywhere, Graziano da Silva said, citing estimates that around one billion people in dry regions may face increasing water scarcity in the near future. These are regions with a high concentration of extreme poverty and hunger.

Agriculture is both a major cause and casualty of water scarcity. Farming accounts for around 70 percent of fresh water withdrawals in the world today, and also contributes to water pollution due to pesticides and chemicals.

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Southern African Women Fight Climate Change Through Smart Farming

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Author: Jeffrey Moyo | Published: January 25, 2017

From planting maize to trying tobacco and cotton on her fields, 44-year-old mother of four Silvia Hungwe says she has seen it all as she wrestles with effects of climate change which have caused her crops to fail each farming season.

Seated under a tree as she talks to InDepthNews (IDN) in Mbudzi on the outskirts of Harare, an area that has turned into a hive of goat trading activity over the years, Hungwe – who has now turned to keeping goats – is on the lookout for customers.

A number of other women like Hungwe are strolling nearby with their goats, eagerly approaching each passer-by in the hope of doing business.

“I tried farming back in my rural home in Mwenezi district in Masvingo Province, but climatic conditions never favoured me as my crops failed me each season,” says Hungwe. “As a result, I decided to go into goat breeding and I bring the goats here to sell. Goats are resistant to drought and whether there are rains or no rains, they survive against all odds.”

Hungwe explains that her husband opted to cross over to neighbouring South Africa almost a decade ago after he realised that farming was not rewarding him in the village, primarily due to the effects of climate change.

“I have not heard from him ever since he left for South Africa around 2007. He just said farming here in the rural areas was not helping him because there are no rains or at times too much rains and he had to try other things across the border. So I said, well, I have to soldier on here and try other ways.”

According to the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, there are approximately 350,000 active female farmers in this southern African nation.

With incessant crop failure in Zimbabwe, official statistics from the country’s Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises and Cooperative Development show that there are approximately 136,000 goat breeders countrywide, ranging from ordinary communal goat breeders to peri-urban goat breeders, 20% of them women.

Climate change experts say women here have become resilient in the face of the changing climatic conditions which have resulted in huge crop failure over the years.

“Many homes, be it in the rural or urban areas are being headed by women who daily come face to face with the effects of climate change because their husbands have either died or migrated to greener pastures after failing to adjust to the climate change impacts back home,” Martin Gombe, a climate change officer for Zimbabwe’s environment, water and climate ministry, told IDN.

With droughts wreaking havoc in vast areas of Zimbabwe, recently worsened by floods that hit the entire country at the beginning of 2017, a majority of women here have taken up so-called climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as food deficits have taken a knock on them and their children.

CSA reduces exposure, sensitivity or vulnerability to climate variability or change through practices and technologies that sustainably increase productivity and support farmers’ adaptation to climate change.

Environment Africa, a regional African non-governmental organisation responding to the continent’s environmental and climatic needs, says climate-smart agriculture is working to help Zimbabwe’s struggling women farmers win their battle against the impact of climate change.

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From Asia to Outback Australia, Farmers Are on the Climate Change Frontline

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Author: Anika Molesworth | Published: January 20, 2017

For those standing on the precipice of life the impacts of climate change are an ever present reality. The rural poor in Southeast Asia are some of the most vulnerable to climate extremes and seasonal vagaries. For these farmers, many who live at subsistence level and survive on less that $1US a day, life is a high-wire act with no safety net.

One stroke of bad luck – a drought, flood or pest outbreak – and they tumble further into hardship. Yet, here in Cambodia I work at an agricultural research centre with the most humbling and inspiring people. Not a day goes by that I don’t stand in awe at an under-resourced team committed to moving mountains despite the odds lined up against them.

It perhaps follows that those who stare so closely at the face of climate change talk only of pertinent matters. The health of their family and community, having enough food to feed them, the quality of their water sources and the condition of their natural environment.

Just over 6,000 kms away is my family’s farm. Located in far western NSW, Broken Hill is known for mining, good pub meals and drag queens. My family purchased our outback sheep station in the year 2000. The start of the decade long Millennium Drought. Tipped head first into volatility of agriculture, it was immediately apparent how interconnected individual components of a farming system are. As we all know, when the rain doesn’t come, less vegetation grows, livestock are sold at reduced weights, crop yields are not achieved, less money in the farmer’s pocket means off-farm employment is sought, and shops in rural towns close.

The far west is an ancient environment. A challenging environment. And an extremely fragile one. Acacias stunted and twisted by the harsh scorch of the desert offer the cool reprieve of shade to lonely sheep. I find this landscape hauntingly beautiful, and impossible not to fall in love with.

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Climate Change Threatens American Agriculture

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Author: Kendra Pierre-Louis | Published: January 20, 2017

You may already be mourning the fact that climate change rings the death knell for beloved foreign grown foods like chocolate and coffee, but a recent study in Nature Communications brings the bad news closer to home. The study found that climate change is also going to hurt domestic staples—wheat, corn, and soybeans—with their yields dropping each day the crops experience temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher. For each day that corn and soybeans fields spend at these temperatures, the study found, yield drops by up to six percent.

Researchers used computer crop models that blend physics, chemistry, biology, and observed data on crop yields. “First we simulated yields from past years and checked to see if they show the same response as reporter yields,” said Bernhard Schauberger a researcher at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the lead author on the study. When the data matched, they then used the model to project forward under different climate scenarios.

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Regenerative Organics: Drawing a Line in the Soil

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Author: Rose Marcario | Published on: December 8, 2016

In recent years, we’ve seen a boom in production and sales of organic foods worldwide. The global organic food market is expected to grow by 16 percent between 2015 and 2020, a faster rate than conventionally-grown foods.

This seems like good news—but in truth, organic farming makes up just a tiny fraction of the global agriculture system controlled by a few giant corporations generating enormous profits. And it’s about to get worse: If current deals in the works make it past European and U.S. regulators, three companies—Bayer, DowDupont and ChemChina—will own two-thirds of the world’s seeds and pesticides.

This unfortunate reality threatens to hold us hostage for decades as conventional agriculture continues to ravage our planet: gobbling up immense fossil fuels for production and shipping, flooding the earth with toxic synthetic pesticides and deadening our soil’s biodiversity with GMO seeds (along with the taste of our food). Conventional agriculture also generates a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions now baking our atmosphere.

And food is just part of the picture. Consider cotton, a fiber used to make a large majority of our clothing globally: just one percent is grown organically. That figure has stayed mostly stagnant since at least 1996, the year Patagonia started sourcing 100 percent organic cotton. It’s especially appalling considering 16 percent of all pesticides used worldwide are used to grow conventional cotton—exposure to which has been linked to higher rates of cancer and other diseases. Conventional GMO farming practices also reduce soil fertility and biodiversity, require more water and large amounts of herbicides, alter the nutritional content of our food, and result in toxic runoff that pollutes our rivers, lakes and oceans.

Thankfully, the status quo isn’t our only option. Regenerative organic agriculture includes any agricultural practice that increases soil organic matter from baseline levels over time, provides long-term economic stability for farmers and ranchers, and creates resilient ecosystems and communities. Put simply, this approach presents an opportunity to reclaim our farming system on behalf of the planet and human health—while fulfilling the obvious need to feed and clothe billions of people around the world. We can produce what we need and revitalize soil at the same time, thereby sequestering carbon currently polluting the atmosphere and warming our planet.

The good news: a small but growing list of organizations with good intentions have embraced regenerative organics in recent years. In particular, this approach (and terminology) has been championed by groups like the Rodale Institute and Regeneration International, and as a result, some businesses have begun taking serious interest. At Patagonia, our interest and knowledge has grown over many years: We began rebuilding our natural fiber supply chains to include organic practices 25 years ago, starting with cotton; more recently, we’ve been prioritizing regenerative practices for apparel and with our food business, Patagonia Provisions.

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Harvests in US to Suffer From Climate Change

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Published: January 19, 2017

 Some of the most important crops risk substantial damage from rising temperatures. To better assess how climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions will likely impact wheat, maize and soybean, an international team of scientists now ran an unprecedentedly comprehensive set of computer simulations of US crop yields. The simulations were shown to reproduce the observed strong reduction in past crop yields induced by high temperatures, thereby confirming that they capture one main mechanism for future projections. Importantly, the scientists find that increased irrigation can help to reduce the negative effects of global warming on crops — but this is possible only in regions where sufficient water is available. Eventually limiting global warming is needed to keep crop losses in check.

“We know from observations that high temperatures can harm crops, but now we have a much better understanding of the processes,” says Bernhard Schauberger from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, lead author of the study. “The computer simulations that we do are based on robust knowledge from physics, chemistry, biology; on a lot of data and elaborate algorithms. But they of course cannot represent the entire complexity of the crop system, hence we call them models. In our study they have passed a critical test.” The scientists compare the model results to data from actual observations. This way, they can find out if they include the critical factors into their calculations, from temperature to CO2, from irrigation to fertilization.

Without efficient emission reductions, yield losses of 20 percent for wheat are possible by 2100

For every single day above 30°C, maize and soybean plants can lose about 5 percent of their harvest. The simulations have shown that the models capture how rather small heat increases beyond this threshold can result in abrupt and substantial yield losses. Such temperatures will be more frequent under unabated climate change and can severely harm agricultural productivity. Harvest losses from elevated temperatures of 20 percent for wheat, 40 percent for soybean and almost 50 percent for maize, relative to non-elevated temperatures, can be expected at the end of our century without efficient emission reductions. These losses do not even consider extremely high temperatures above 36°C, which are expected to lower yields further.

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Climate Change and Farming: Let’s Be Part of the Solution!

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Author: Anna Bowen | Published on: January 9, 2017

What with rising rainfall in the west, and hotter, drier summers in the east, British farmers place plenty of challenges from global warming, writes Anna Bowen. But there are also positive opportunities for agricultural innovators to adapt their farming systems to changing conditions, make their operations more resilient and sustainable, and make themselves part of the solution.

“I think it’s time to change my farming system”, said my client. “A switch from dairy to rice paddies.”

Looking at his sodden fields, it wasn’t hard to imagine.

When you work with farmers, conversations about the weather are inevitable. Their livelihoods are intrinsically linked to the climate, and very often they and their animals are at the mercy of the elements.

As a consultant I work with long-term financial projections and business plans. In light of rising global temperatures it would be foolish to overlook the impact that climate change may have on my dairy farming clients in the dampness of West Wales.

The last decade has seen record-setting wet years for Britain, and the risk of flooding and the problems associated with sodden ground look likely to be an increasing challenge for farmers. The Environment Agency state that precipitation in the West of the country is expected to increase by up to 33%, a significant rise for an area that already experiences some of the highest rainfall in the UK.

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Dust Bowl Would Devastate Today’s Crops, Study Finds

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Author: Robert Mitchum | Published on: December 20, 2016

A drought on the scale of the legendary Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s would have similarly destructive effects on U.S. agriculture today, despite technological and agricultural advances, a new study finds. Additionally, warming temperatures could lead to crop losses at the scale of the Dust Bowl, even in normal precipitation years by the mid-21st century, UChicago scientists conclude.

The study, published Dec. 12 in Nature Plants, simulated the effect of from the Dust Bowl era on today’s maize, soy and wheat crops. Authors Michael Glotter and Joshua Elliott of the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the Computation Institute, examined whether modern agricultural innovations would protect against history repeating itself under similar conditions.

“We expected to find the system much more resilient because 30 percent of production is now irrigated in the United States, and because we’ve abandoned corn production in more severely drought-stricken places such as Oklahoma and west Texas,” said Elliott, a fellow and research scientist at the center and the Computation Institute. “But we found the opposite: The system was just as sensitive to drought and heat as it was in the 1930s.”

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Take the 2017 National Young Farmer Survey

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Author: Chelsey Simpson | Published: January 9, 2017

Through our first national survey in 2011, young farmers and ranchers came together to tell the nation—citizens, advocates, and policy makers—who they were and what they needed in order to succeed. The results from that survey inspired new programs and influenced policies in every state. Now we have the opportunity to speak up again.

Help us tell Congress that #FarmersCount by taking the 2017 National Young Farmer Survey:

Your participation will help us understand and elevate the issues that matter most to young farmers. It is crucial that the survey results represent all young farmers and aspiring farmers, no matter where they live or what they grow.

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Young Farmers: Strengthening the Agricultural Resilience of the Cook Islands to Climate Change

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Author: UN Development Programme | Published: January 13, 2017 

In Mangaia, the second largest of the Cook Islands, five young leaders are being trained in organic farming practices so that they can supply their local markets, as well as export their crops to the capital island of Rarotonga, alleviating the country’s heavy reliance on foreign imports. Three of the five participants are women, who were not traditionally farmers on Mangaia.

FARMING REVOLUTION

The SRIC-CC Programme is implemented by Climate Change Cook Islands, a division within the Office of the Prime Minister and supported by UNDP. With financial support from the Adaptation Fund (AF), the SRIC-CC Programme and communities in the Pa Enua are addressing environmental risks through community-based approaches and community-driven adaptation.

The Strengthening the Resilience of the Cook Islands to Climate Change Programme (SRIC-CC), is working with more than 150 individuals on community-based resilience initiatives to enhance water and food security across the 11 Pa Enua (outer islands) of the Cook Islands.

FARM TO TABLE, SEED TO MARKET

As part of the SRIC-CC programme managed by William Tuivaga, a Young Farmers’ programme has been established. Under the watchful eyes of SRIC-CC agriculture Young Growers Project Manager Makiroa Beniamina, all five of the young farmers have covered the following in their training: best practices in germinating seeds, nursery management, pest management, fertiliser management, composting, farm management, quality control, marketing and packaging, managing loss and farm administration.

The Young Farmers’ programme is working with Prime Foods Supermarket to sell the produce to their clients on the wholesale market, as well as to restaurants, hotels and retail shops throughout the Cook Islands. This project will provide a more consistent supply of vegetables and other crops, thereby promoting healthy eating and food security on Mangaia, along with an increased supply of locally grown produce in the capital, Rarotonga.

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