Global Warming ‘Costing Taxpayers Billions.’ Here’s How to Fix It.

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Another report sounding the alarm about climate change.

Another missed opportunity to talk about the most promising solution: regenerative agriculture.

The New York Times yesterday cited a new report by the notoriously conservative Government Accountability Office (GAO), which said “climate change is costing taxpayers billions.”

CNN also reported on the GAO study, which calls on Trump to “craft appropriate responses.”

The CNN coverage noted several initiatives to combat climate change undertaken under the Obama administration—the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to lower carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, and the Paris climate agreement, which saw almost every country agree to voluntary limits on future carbon emissions.

The current climate-denying Trump administration wants to scrap those and other climate initiatives, in favor of prioritizing corporate profits.

But that’s not why I’m writing today. I’m writing because once again, a major report on the costs—financial, social, environmental, political—of doing nothing to slow runaway global warming focuses exclusively on reducing carbon emissions.  The new report fails to mention that even if we achieved zero emissions tomorrow, we’re still in big trouble—unless we draw down and sequester the billions of tons of carbon already in the atmosphere.

Once again, a major report on global warming fails to acknowledge that we have the tools readily at our disposal to draw down that carbon. They are the regenerative agriculture and land-use practices outlined in a recent Stanford Woods Institute report, which says:

“If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet. Managed well, soil’s ability to trap carbon dioxide is potentially much greater than previously estimated, according to Stanford researchers who claim the resource could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions. They call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about this valuable resource.”

The federal government has no problem subsidizing—to the tune of $20 billion/year—GMO monoculture crops that degrade the soil and play a major role in making global warming worse.

But Congress wants to cut back on research that would help us improve soil health as a means of combating global warming?

Fortunately, other governments are incorporating “the soil solution” into their policies and plans to combat global warming. The most significant is France’s “4 for 1000: Soils for Food Security and Climate” Initiative launched by the French government at the Paris Climate Summit in December 2015.

In the U.S., some states are taking steps of their own to enact regenerative agriculture policies, notably California, Vermont and Massachusetts.

If your state isn’t on the list, maybe it’s time to start building a Regeneration Movement in your own community?

We can no longer ignore our best hope for averting climate catastrophe. If federal lawmakers won’t acknowledge the soil solutiion, we need to make sure our local and state officials get on board.

How Climate Change and Wars Are Increasing World Hunger

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Author: Leah Samberg | Published: October 18, 2017

Around the globe, about 815 million people—11 percent of the world’s population—went hungry in 2016, according to the latest data from the United Nations. This was the first increase in more than 15 years.

Between 1990 and 2015, due largely to a set of sweeping initiatives by the global community, the proportion of undernourished people in the world was cut in half. In 2015, UN member countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which doubled down on this success by setting out to end hunger entirely by 2030. But a recent UN report shows that, after years of decline, hunger is on the rise again.

As evidenced by nonstop news coverage of floods, fires, refugees and violence, our planet has become a more unstable and less predictable place over the past few years. As these disasters compete for our attention, they make it harder for people in poor, marginalized and war-torn regions to access adequate food.

I study decisions that smallholder farmers and pastoralists, or livestock herders, make about their crops, animals and land. These choices are limited by lack of access to services, markets or credit; by poor governance or inappropriate policies; and by ethnic, gender and educational barriers. As a result, there is often little they can do to maintain secure or sustainable food production in the face of crises.

The new UN report shows that to reduce and ultimately eliminate hunger, simply making agriculture more productive will not be enough. It also is essential to increase the options available to rural populations in an uncertain world.

Conflict and climate change threaten rural livelihoods

Around the world, social and political instability are on the rise. Since 2010, state-based conflict has increased by 60 percent and armed conflict within countries has increased by 125 percent. More than half of the food-insecure people identified in the UN report (489 million out of 815 million) live in countries with ongoing violence. More than three-quarters of the world’s chronically malnourished children (122 million of 155 million) live in conflict-affected regions.

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Regreening the Planet Could Cut as Much Carbon as Halting Oil Use – Report

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Natural solutions such as tree planting, protecting peatlands and better land management could account for 37% of all cuts needed by 2030, says study

Author: Reuters | Published: October 17, 2017

Planting forests and other activities that harness the power of nature could play a major role in limiting global warming under the 2015 Paris agreement, an international study showed on Monday.

Natural climate solutions, also including protection of carbon-storing peatlands and better management of soils and grasslands, could account for 37% of all actions needed by 2030 under the 195-nation Paris plan, it said.

Combined, the suggested “regreening of the planet” would be equivalent to halting all burning of oil worldwide, it said.

“Better stewardship of the land could have a bigger role in fighting climate change than previously thought,” the international team of scientists said of findings published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
The estimates for nature’s potential, led by planting forests, were up to 30% higher than those envisaged by a UN panel of climate scientists in a 2014 report, it said.

Trees soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they burn or rot. That makes forests, from the Amazon to Siberia, vast natural stores of greenhouse gases.

Overall, better management of nature could avert 11.3bn tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year by 2030, the study said, equivalent to China’s current carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use.

The Paris climate agreement, weakened by US president Donald Trump’s decision in June to pull out, seeks to limit a rise in global temperature to “well below” 2C above pre-industrial times.

Current government pledges to cut emissions are too weak to achieve the 2C goal, meant to avert more droughts, more powerful storms, downpours and heat waves.

 

“Fortunately, this research shows we have a huge opportunity to reshape our food and land use systems,” Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, said in a statement of Monday’s findings.

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Diversity of Large Animals Plays an Important Role in Carbon Cycle

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Author: Taylor Kubota | Published: October 10, 2017

Trees in tropical forests are well known for removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing the potent greenhouse gas as carbon in their leafy branches and extensive roots. But a new analysis led by Stanford University researchers finds that large forest animals are also an important part of the carbon cycle.

The findings are based on more than a million records of animal sightings and activity collected by 340 indigenous technicians in the Amazon during more than three years of environmental surveys, coordinated by ecologist Jose Fragoso and supported by biologist Rodolfo Dirzo, who were working together at Stanford at the time. The team found that places where animals are most diverse correlate with places that have the most carbon sequestered in the soil.

“It’s not enough to worry about the trees in the world holding carbon. That’s really important but it’s not the whole story,” said Fragoso. “We also have to worry about maintaining the diversity and abundance of animals, especially mammals at this point, in order to ensure a well-functioning carbon cycle and the retention of carbon in soils.”

Although scientists have long understood that animals — through ingestion, digestion, breathing and decomposition — are part of the carbon cycle, the work, published Oct. 9 in Nature Ecology and Evolution is the first to suggest the importance of animal biodiversity rather than just animal numbers in the carbon cycle.

If we want to increase carbon sequestration, we have to preserve not only high numbers of animals but also many different species, the authors said.

Mining an unprecedented data source

The inspiration for this work came from a conversation during a Biology Department happy hour years ago. The scientists knew that an ecosystem with more species generally functions better, which they assumed should include the carbon cycle. Proving the relationship between animal diversity and carbon, however, was not so straightforward.

“It is a very difficult idea to test regarding vertebrates in a real-world system such as the Amazon,” said Mar Sobral, lead author of the paper, who was a postdoctoral researcher in the Dirzo Lab during this research. “The amount of data needed to test such an idea is massive and the type of data is a big challenge. The economic resources, time and logistics involved in our project are unprecedented.”

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How Treating Dirt Well Could Fight Climate Change

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Author: Rob Jordan-Stanford | Published: October 9, 2017

With the right management, soil could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions by  trapping carbon dioxide.

In two overlapping papers, researchers call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about soil’s benefits and emphasize the need for more research into how—if managed well—it could mitigate a rapidly changing climate.

“Dirt is not exciting to most people,” says Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University, lead author of the first paper in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics article, and coauthor of the second paper in Global Change Biology paper. “But it is a no-risk climate solution with big co-benefits. Fostering soil health protects food security and builds resilience to droughts, floods and urbanization.”

Risks and promise

Organic matter in soil, such as decomposing plant and animal residues, stores more carbon than do plants and the atmosphere combined. Unfortunately, the carbon in soil has been widely lost or degraded through land use changes and unsustainable forest and agricultural practices, fires, nitrogen deposition, and other human activities. The greatest near-term threat comes from thawing permafrost in Earth’s northern reaches, which could release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Despite these risks, there is also great promise, according to Jackson and Jennifer Harden, a visiting scholar in Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and lead author of the Global Change Biology paper.

Improving how the land is managed could increase soil’s carbon storage enough to offset future carbon emissions from thawing permafrost, the researchers find. Among the possible approaches: reduced tillage, year-round livestock forage, and compost application. Planting more perennial crops, instead of annuals, could store more carbon and reduce erosion by allowing roots to reach deeper into the ground.

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Soil Holds Potential to Slow Global Warming, Stanford Researchers Find

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Author: Rob Jordan | Published: October 5, 2017

If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet. Managed well, soil’s ability to trap carbon dioxide is potentially much greater than previously estimated, according to Stanford researchers who claim the resource could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions. They call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about this valuable resource.

The work, published in two overlapping papers Oct. 5 in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics and Global Change Biology, emphasizes the need for more research into how soil – if managed well – could mitigate a rapidly changing climate.

“Dirt is not exciting to most people,” said Earth system science professor Rob Jackson, lead author of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics article and co-author of the Global Change Biology paper. “But it is a no-risk climate solution with big co-benefits. Fostering soil health protects food security and builds resilience to droughts, floods and urbanization.”

Humble, yet mighty

Organic matter in soil, such as decomposing plant and animal residues, stores more carbon than do plants and the atmosphere combined. Unfortunately, the carbon in soil has been widely lost or degraded through land use changes and unsustainable forest and agricultural practices, fires, nitrogen deposition and other human activities. The greatest near-term threat comes from thawing permafrost in Earth’s northern reaches, which could release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Despite these risks, there is also great promise, according to Jackson and Jennifer Harden, a visiting scholar in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and lead author of the Global Change Biology paper.

KEEP READING ON STANFORD UNIVERSITY NEWS

Climate Change: Could Sustainable Agriculture Be the Silver Bullet We Are Looking For?

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Agriculture has become one of the greatest threats to the future of our planet, writes Magdy Martínez-Solimán from UNDP.

Author: Magdy Martinez-Soliman | Published: October 5, 2017

As world leaders convened at the UN’s annual General Assembly last week, amidst the backdrop of New York’s Climate Week, the message was clear: we must act now and we must act together to tackle climate change.

It’s inspiring rhetoric but what exactly does this mean in practice?

When we, the global community, are confronted with mounting and seemingly overwhelming challenges in the face of climate change, it’s often difficult to know what to tackle first.

Where should we focus our efforts? Protecting the forests, the lungs of our Earth? What about the increasing scarcity of fresh water, waning food security, air pollution, reducing poverty, disaster preparedness in the face of more ferocious storms? The list goes on.

However, there is a more holistic way to tackle these issues and it starts with agriculture.

Many of these challenges can be considered symptoms of a broader, and frankly unsustainable, global agriculture economy which, until recently, we have been reluctant to collectively confront.

Agriculture in the 21st century is fundamental; it’s essential to our very existence. Today, the commercial production of agricultural commodities is a dominant economic force in many national and developing rural economies. Worldwide, the livelihoods of 2.5 billion people depend on agriculture.

Yet, ironically, agriculture has also become one of the greatest threats to the future of our planet. Considered to be the biggest driver of tropical deforestation today, the consequences of unsustainable agriculture include losses to habitats and biodiversity, rising carbon dioxide levels as well as the degradation of essential ecosystem services such as clean water and fresh air which we depend on for our very survival.

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Soil and Land Initiatives Seek to Spur Action Across SDGs

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Author: Wangu Mwangi | Published: September 28, 2017

Recent research and initiatives undertaken by UN agencies, governments and NGOs highlight the links between soil health and the achievement of development goals and priorities related to climate change, agriculture, gender, biodiversity and poverty. Among them, the Land Portal Foundation, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) launched a weekly blog series promoting land monitoring and information sharing for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Under the auspices of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), regional and country-level activities are underway to boost soil monitoring capacities and data sharing for sustainable soil management.

In the first featured post under the new blog series titled, ‘Land and the Sustainable Development Goals,’ Jeffrey Sachs, SDSN Director, describes land use as “the most important bridge between the SDGs,” noting that land is at the heart of poverty eradication, food security, gender equality, water management, decent work, sustainable cities, ending climate change, and protecting biodiversity. Calling for new approaches to land-use planning, he highlights the launch of a study known as FABLE (Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land Use, and Energy), which aims to enhance interactions among agronomists, foresters, conservationists, hydrologists, and climate scientists, as well as with the communities whose lives they impact. [Land and the SDGs Blog]

This theme is taken up in a Working Paper published by the FAO’s Land and Water Division, which explores current and emerging needs in land resource planning (LRP) for food security, sustainable livelihoods, integrated landscape management, and restoration. The paper argues that the juxtaposed challenges of population growth, demands on limited resources by diverse actors, land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change require the rational use of resources to sustain and enhance productivity and maintain resilient ecosystems. Noting the need for an updated set of integrated landscape management tools and approaches, the paper presents the results of a survey of LRP tools and approaches that led to the establishment of the FAO’s Land Resources Planning Toolbox to help decision-makers and land users put sustainable land management into practice. [Publication: Land Resource Planning for Sustainable Land Management]

During the 4th Regular Meeting of the South American Soil Partnership, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in August 2017, seven countries launched a project to measure the organic carbon contained in their soils as part of a regional climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy. One of the main objectives of the project, which is being undertaken in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, is to release national soil organic carbon maps and work on a harmonized regional soil map by the end of 2017. By supporting countries to build their national soil information systems, the project aims to contribute to improved local decision making and to advise farmers and land users on how to restore degraded soil, tackle environmental challenges, increase yields and raise agricultural productivity. The project also seeks to strengthen the Latin American Soils Information System (SISLAC), as a decision making and policy development tool for the agricultural and rural development sector. [FAO-GSP Press Release on National Soil Information Systems in Latin America]

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Importance of Working Landscapes to California’s Economy and Climate Change

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Author: Stephanie Larson and Adam Livingston | Published: September 27, 2017

To accelerate California’s policy leadership in the face of global crises like water scarcity, climate change and uneven economic development between urban and rural areas, it is essential to recognize of the importance of the state’s natural capital, especially in relation to working landscapes and rural economies.

The California Economic Summit defines working landscapes to include farmland, ranches, forest, wetlands, mines, water bodies and other natural resource lands, both private and public. Carbon is the energy currency of most biological systems, including agricultural ecosystems. All agricultural production originates from the process of plant photosynthesis, which uses sunshine to combine carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air with water and minerals from the soil to produce plant material, both above and below ground.

Agriculture is the ONE sector that can transform from a net emitter of CO2 to a net sequestered of CO2.

There is no other human-managed realm with this potential. Common agricultural practices, including driving a tractor, tilling the soil, grazing, result in the return of CO2 to the air. However, all farming is “carbon farming” because all agricultural production depends upon plant photosynthesis to move carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into the plant, where it is transformed into agricultural products, whether food, flora, fuel or fiber.

Agriculture contributes only 9 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions in the US (EPA); and agricultural landscapes, particularly grassland/rangelands, have great potential to function as a sponge for carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. The maximum capacity of soil to store organic carbon is determined by soil type (percent clay); management practices implemented to maximize plant growth and minimize losses of organic carbon from soil can increase organic carbon storage in soil. Keeping working lands “working” can result in long-term carbon storage (decades to centuries or more) in soils.

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4 per 1000 Initiative Wins Prestigious Award

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Published: September 13, 2017

The 13th Conference of the Parties (COP) on the fight against desertification is taking place in China from Sept. 6 to 16, 2017. In preparation for this event, the World Future Council identified, on a planetary scale, the most innovative policies and those best placed to stop soil degradation and desertification. As part of this, the jury selected the innovative French-initiated 4 per 1000 Initiative!

Launched on the international scene as part of the COP 21 Paris climate conference in December 2015, the 4 per 1000 Initiative invited all signatory partners of the common declaration to implement concrete actions for storing carbon in soils and promotes the type of practices to achieve it (agro-ecology, agroforestry, or conservation agriculture, for example).

By capturing CO2 in the air, via photosynthesis, plants absorb carbon. By decomposing, the plants will produce organic matter that will store the carbon in the soils, which constitutes the largest stock of carbon on the planet. This carbon sequestration in the earth allows to improve soil health, reinforce ecosystems and to increase agricultural production.

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