Can Agriculture and the Climate Fix Their 'Unhappy Marriage' in 2018?

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Author: Thin Lei Win | Published: December 28, 2017

ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – After René Castro-Salazar attended the first U.N.-led climate talks in Berlin in 1985 as Costa Rica’s environment and energy minister, he tried to talk about agriculture and climate change – but few wanted to join the conversation.

“There was always opposition – and we couldn’t understand why,” said Castro, now assistant director-general at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

To him, the need to tackle the topic was clear.

Agriculture, forestry and other land uses together account for nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions heating up the planet, according to the FAO.

Cutting these is essential if the world is to keep global temperature rise to a manageable level, said Castro.

Farms and forests can also store large amounts of carbon, and simple actions by all countries could result in immediate environmental benefits, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In the early years, the climate negotiations focused on reducing emissions from the energy sector – the largest emitter – while the relationship between agriculture and climate change was not fully understood.

Later on, poor states feared discussing the linkage would result in obligations for them to curb emissions from farming. Rich nations worried they would have to pay for poor farmers to adapt to a changing climate.

At November’s climate talks in Bonn, the stalemate was finally broken, with nations agreeing to move forward on issues related to agriculture and climate change.

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'A Low-Carbon Livestock Sector is Possible', Says UN Chief

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The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has called for sustainable, low-carbon practices to be built into the developing world’s growing livestock sector.

Published: January 23, 2018

Speaking at the recent 10th Global Forum for Food and Agriculture in Belin, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva, said:

“With improved and climate-smart practices, we can quickly put in place more sustainable and greener livestock supply chains…A low-carbon livestock sector is possible to achieve”.

The FAO estimates that livestock generates 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human sources and the industry is expected to expand as demand grows within developing countries.

While the Director-General was keen to point out that an increase in demand for animal products is a good sign among some of the world’s poorest communities, it isn’t without potential pitfalls. This includes how the sector’s growth can align with the Paris climate agreement to reduce carbon emissions and limit global temperatures to below 2 degrees.

However, the FAO believes that emissions can be cut by up to 30 percent by adopting a variety of climate-smart agricultural practices.

These include greater uptake of energy from waste, recycling nutrients, regenerative grazing and managing pasturelands so that carbon is stored within the soil.

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How California Farmers can Conserve Water and Combat Climate Change

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Author: Rich Collins | Published: December 9, 2017

In January and February, no less than 125 million gallons of rain fell upon my 200-acre farm, located off Highway 80 between Dixon and Davis.

Our soil, blanketed with an annual winter cover crop of mixed grass and legumes, absorbed all of those 24 inches of rain. Not one single gallon left our property.

Where did all that water go? Some was used by the cover crop and a small amount evaporated. But most sank down to be stored in the soil and to recharge groundwater.

On conventionally managed fields nearby, copious and disheartening amounts of rainwater ran off, causing some localized flooding. But most it made its way out the Delta, then the bay and beyond. It was an opportunity lost.

Similarly, I fear Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature will be missing an opportunity in the coming budget.

California is a global leader on climate change. Brown and legislative leaders miss no opportunity to remind the world of our model. The state has an ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target and many climate change programs to achieve those goals.

Among them are agriculture programs supported by farmers and ranchers that help store carbon in soil, trees and shrubs; fund conservation easements that spare farmland threatened by development; and help dairies reduce methane emissions. More than $200 million has been invested in these programs.

However, our leaders could be missing a great opportunity to support sustainable agricultural solutions to climate change unless they provide at least a modest sum for critically important sustainable agriculture programs.

The State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program has provided financial assistance to growers for improvements that save water and energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Launched in 2014 during the drought, and oversubscribed by more than 200 percent, this popular program has provided $67.5 million for almost 600 projects across the state. Over the 10-year life of the project, 700,000 acre-feet of water will be conserved, and there will be a reduction of 225,000 tons of greenhouse gas. It will be one of the state’s most cost-effective climate programs.

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How California’s Fires Are Linked to Climate Chaos, Soil Health and Food Choices

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Throughout history, agriculture has caused the loss of fertile soil, leading to the downfall of civilizations.

Author: John W. Roulac | Published: January 22, 2018

In late 2017, Northern Californians suffered a firestorm in eight counties simultaneously, followed by the devastating Thomas Fire (now the largest in state history) in Southern California.

For many of us, the fires provoked a déjà vu feeling of “apocalypse now.” There were two dozen fatalities, entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, thousands of homes and family possessions were turned into grey debris, massive plumes of severely unhealthy smoke and soot wafted in the air for weeks, and a highly toxic soup of ash and grime flowed into rivers and then the ocean.

Many people close to me lost everything. Yet, through this time of need, there has been a heartening outpouring of community goodwill to help friends and strangers alike. As we rebuild and move forward, a new question is emerging. Will Californians begin to understand the connection between climate chaos—with its ongoing drought, searing temperatures and vulnerability to fires—and industrial agriculture—the world’s leading cause of climate change?

Over the centuries, agriculture has caused the loss and degradation of fertile soil leading to the downfall of civilizations worldwide. Modern industrial agriculture is doing it even faster. Today’s food system is based on copious amounts of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and the confinement of cows, chickens, and pigs. Agriculture is a major contributor to the 75% drop in winged insect populations. The massive footprint of this carbon-centric system is accelerating climate change and the deadly weather anomalies that follow as a consequence.

The Solution Under Our Feet

There is a climate solution literally under our feet, based on healthy soils and on pastures that yield better-tasting and more nutritious foods while conserving water and sequestering carbon. A new movement called regenerative agriculture seeks food grown in a manner that more closely mimics nature.

Regenerative ag restores and maintains natural systems, like water and carbon cycles, to enable the land to continue to produce food in a manner that both moderates the climate and is beneficial for people’s nutrition and the long-term health of the planet. Plants and soil organisms literally pull carbon from the atmosphere and build it into healthy soil.

Our generation has the responsibility to return this legacy load of carbon back to our forests, farm fields and grassland. If we fail to take heed then our climate and oceans are in peril from excess carbon.

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Biodiversity for Resilience Against Natural Disasters

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Author: Rocco Pallin | Published: January 2018

Climate change is increasingly putting pressure on farmers and the global food systems, according to researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and the transdisciplinary International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES). These groups and others are highlighting the importance of resilience—an ecosystem’s capacity to resist or recover from stress, shocks, and disturbances—for the security and productivity of the world’s food and farming systems in the face of climate change.

Resilience matters most for feeding the world’s growing population as the climate changes, according to these leading food security and agriculture groups, and agricultural biodiversity can be key to building it.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines agricultural biodiversity as the diversity among plants, animals, and microorganisms directly or indirectly used for agriculture and food production.

Agricultural biodiversity exists at three levels, all of which are important for climate adaptation. On a regional level, agricultural biodiversity involves farms in proximity to one another growing and supporting a range of different crops and species. At the farm level, crop diversity can mean farmers employ sustainability measures like crop rotation to maintain soil health, or agroforestry, or intercropping. Farmers utilize genetic diversity of crops when they grow several different species of a crop rather than one variety.

Research from CGIAR, FAO, and others over last two decades has concluded thatbiodiversity significantly contributes to resilience, and furthermore that a combination of biodiversity-increasing strategies often yields the greatest results.

For example, in the Central American hillsides in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch, researchers who surveyed farms and agricultural damage concluded that farmers engaged in diversification “such as cover crops, intercropping, and agroforestry suffered less damage than their conventional monoculture neighbors.”

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NASA Langley Scientist Touts Biochar: An 'Environmental Superstar'

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Author: Tamara Dietrich | Published: January 9, 2017

Over many centuries — perhaps millennia — primitive peoples plowed biochar into farm fields, turning poor soil into rich cropland.

In fact, it’s such a miraculous soil amendment that 20 years ago researchers found that biochar applied in the Amazon basin more than 500 years before is still enriching soils there.

“It hadn’t broken down, it hadn’t rotted or degraded or anything,” said Doris Hamill, a physicist at NASA Langley Research Center with a deep interest in green technologies. “And that made people say, ‘Hmmm, you know, if biochar can be put in soils and not break down for hundreds of years, this could be a real solution to global warming.’ ”

That’s right — global warming. That’s because an added benefit of carbon-packed biochar is that, by plowing it into farm fields, it removes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide indefinitely from the carbon cycle.

But that’s not all.

Biochar can be made from common organic waste material — from chicken and cow poop to sticks and brush from your yard. It can make environmentally unfriendly synthetic fertilizers obsolete. It can trap nutrient runoff before it pollutes places like the Chesapeake Bay. It can even filter out toxic heavy metals from water.

“It’s an environmental superstar,” Hamill said. “It’s global warming, it’s soil fertility, it’s sustainable agriculture, it is protection of groundwater — it just does everything. It’s really kind of amazing.”

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NASA Langley Scientist Touts Biochar: An ‘Environmental Superstar’

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Author: Tamara Dietrich | Published: January 9, 2017

Over many centuries — perhaps millennia — primitive peoples plowed biochar into farm fields, turning poor soil into rich cropland.

In fact, it’s such a miraculous soil amendment that 20 years ago researchers found that biochar applied in the Amazon basin more than 500 years before is still enriching soils there.

“It hadn’t broken down, it hadn’t rotted or degraded or anything,” said Doris Hamill, a physicist at NASA Langley Research Center with a deep interest in green technologies. “And that made people say, ‘Hmmm, you know, if biochar can be put in soils and not break down for hundreds of years, this could be a real solution to global warming.’ ”

That’s right — global warming. That’s because an added benefit of carbon-packed biochar is that, by plowing it into farm fields, it removes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide indefinitely from the carbon cycle.

But that’s not all.

Biochar can be made from common organic waste material — from chicken and cow poop to sticks and brush from your yard. It can make environmentally unfriendly synthetic fertilizers obsolete. It can trap nutrient runoff before it pollutes places like the Chesapeake Bay. It can even filter out toxic heavy metals from water.

“It’s an environmental superstar,” Hamill said. “It’s global warming, it’s soil fertility, it’s sustainable agriculture, it is protection of groundwater — it just does everything. It’s really kind of amazing.”

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Our Best Environment Stories of 2017

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From soil to algae and fish to flowers, food and the environment are entwined; here are some of Civil Eats’ top stories exploring the connection.

Published: December 26, 2017

Climate change puts farmers in a double bind: The food system is both a major contributor to global warming, and food producers are also already reeling from the effects of a warming planet. Throughout 2017, Civil Eats profiled the interconnection of food and the environment, both how the changing planet is reshaping food systems and also how to produce food in harmony with the planet.

Below, in chronological order, are our top environmental stories from 2017:

California’s Drought Continues to Harm Native Tribes and Fishermen
By Kristine Wong
Communities that depend on salmon among those that suffer the most during drought.

Can Organic Food Prevent a Public Health Crisis?
By Elizabeth Grossman
From children’s development to antibiotic resistance, a European Parliament report charted the many benefits of organic food.

[Editor’s note: In July 2017, we lost Lizzie Grossman, our senior reporter and a pioneering environmental health journalist, to cancer. We published a tribute to Lizzie after her passing, and all of her work for Civil Eats is published in this archive.]

Mapping the Benefits of Farm Biodiversity
By Liz Carlisle

Scientists are finding that simply growing more kinds of food (and rotating crops) can make farms less reliant on pesticides—and more financially solvent.

Monsanto’s Driverless Car: Is CRISPR Gene Editing Driving Seed Consolidation?
By Twilight Greenaway
Gene editing technology is being heralded as a game-changer, but it raises serious questions as five of the Big Six agriculture and chemical companies seek to merge.

Can California Reverse EPA’s U-Turn on Pesticide Ban?
By Elizabeth Grossman
Lawmakers in the Golden State have the power to go beyond the agency’s recent decision not to ban chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin that impacts thousands of children, farmworkers, and rural communities.

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Responding To Climate Change Through Community Involvement

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Author: Rana Ashish Singh | Published: January 7, 2018

Climate Change

The climate of the world is changing constantly due to global warming, which is being caused by both natural and man-made activities. These changes have an enormous impact on people’s lives and ecosystems. Developing countries, and particularly the poorest people in these countries, are the most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate variability and ongoing climate change. Their economies depend heavily on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, a reliable water supply, and other natural resources. They are generally hindered by limited human capacity and limited access to technology and capital to invest in risk reduction. Thus, it is imperative that climate change adaptation is not separated from other priorities but is integrated into development planning, programs, and projects.

Impacts Of Climate Change On Hills And Mountains

Mountains are rich repositories of biodiversity and water. Downstream flow of water is heavily dependent on mountains. Climate change can impact biodiversity and the flow of ecosystem services either directly or indirectly through many impact mechanisms. Changes in phonology, physiology, behavior, and evolutionary changes are the most often cited species-level responses. At the ecosystem level, changes in structure, function, patterns of disturbance and the increased dominance of invasive species is a noted concern. Following are the major potential impacts of climate change on species, landscape, water and human well-being.

Resilience

The IPCC (2007a) defines ‘resilience’ as the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances, while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change. Resiliency can also be defined by a capacity to cope successfully in the face of significant future risk.

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Framework Agreement on Climate Change Reached at COP23 Climate Negotiations

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Author: Michael Peñuelas | Published: December 2017

For the first time in the 25-year history of international climate negotiations, the 197 member countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have reached an agreement on agriculture. The milestone came near the close of the 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) of the UNFCCC and formally establishes a process called the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture.

This process lays the groundwork for the two subsidiary bodies of the UNFCCC, one focused on technical advice and one on implementation measures, to review and consolidate experience and information on issues related to agriculture through workshops and technical expert meetings.

“Climate change is already affecting agriculture and food security,” said José Graziano da Silva, the Director-General of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. “Without urgent action to adapt agriculture and meet a growing global demand for food, there will be more hungry people in the world. [The Koronivia] decision is a major step to address this problem, and to enable the agricultural sectors to also engage in worldwide efforts to limit global warming.”

The framework requests reports in three years, at COP26 in 2020, from the two bodies, the Subsidiary Body for Science and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI).

Countries identified five initial focus areas for the work: methods and approaches for assessing adaptation, adaptation co-benefits, and resilience; improved soil carbon, soil health and soil fertility under grassland and cropland; improved nutrient use and manure management towards sustainable and resilient agricultural systems; improved livestock management systems; and socioeconomic and food security dimensions of climate change in the agricultural sector.

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