Is Climate Change Putting World’s Microbiomes at Risk?

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Author: Jim Robbins

In 1994, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory moved soil from moist, high-altitude sites to warmer and drier places lower in altitude, and vice versa. In 2011, they returned to the sites and looked again at the soil microbes and found that they had done little to adapt functionally to their new home. That’s a bad sign, experts say, for a world convulsed by a changing climate.

“These microbes have somehow lost the capacity to adapt to the new conditions,” said Vanessa Bailey, one of the authors of the study, published this month in PLOS One. That not what scientists anticipated, and it “calls into question the resilience of the overall environment to climate change,” she said. “Soil is the major buffer for environmental changes, and the microbial community is the basis for that resilience.”

As snow and ice melt, it’s fairly straightforward to grasp what climate change means for the future of, say, polar bears in the Arctic or penguins in Antarctica. But it’s far more difficult to understand what is happening to the planetary microbiome in the earth’s crust and water, a quadrillion quadrillion microorganisms, according to Scientific American. Yet it is far more important, for microbes run the world. They are key players that perpetuate life on the planet, provide numerous ecosystem services, and serve as a major bulwark against environmental changes.

Researchers say that as the planet warms, essential diversity and function in the microbial world could be lost.

But they can also cause serious problems — as the world’s permafrost melts, microbes are turning once-frozen vegetation into greenhouse gases at a clip that is alarming scientists.

KEEP READING ON YALE ENVIRONMENT 360

Freebee: How bees can help raise food security of 2 billion smallholders at no cost

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What do cucumbers, mustard, almonds and alfalfa have in common? On the surface very little. But there is one thing they share: they all owe their existence to the service of bees.

For centuries, this tiny striped helper has labored the world’s fields without winning much recognition for its many contributions to food production. Wild bees, in particular, seemed doomed to slog in the shadow of their more popular cousin – the honeybee – whose day job of producing golden nectar has been far more visible and celebrated.

But bees of all stripes are finally getting their moment in the sun with the publication of a paper that quantifies, for the first time, just how much our crop yields depend on the work of pollinators who unknowingly fertilize plants as they move from flower to flower.

And in doing so, they may have a key role to play in improving the production of some 2 billion smallholder farmers worldwide and ensuring the food security and nutrition of the world’s growing population.

The paper, published in the magazine Science, makes the case that ecological intensification – or boosting farm outputs by tapping the power of natural processes — is one of the sustainable pathways toward greater food supplies.

KEEP READING ON FAO

Meet John D. Liu, the Indiana Jones of Landscape Restoration

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[ English | Español ]

He’s known to some as the “Indiana Jones” of landscape degradation and restoration.

John D. Liu, ecosystem restoration researcher, educator and filmmaker, has dedicated his life to sharing real-world examples of once-degraded landscapes newly restored to their original fertile and biodiverse beauty. Liu is director of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP), ecosystem ambassador for the Commonland Foundation and a visiting research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We recently sat down with Liu, the newest member of the Regeneration International (RI) Steering Committee. In this interview, Liu walks us through large-scale ecosystem restoration projects in China and Rwanda. We learn that when humans work with nature, degraded landscapes can be restored in a matter of years, and economies can be regenerated, putting food security and climate change mitigation within our reach.

In order to survive as a species, Liu explains, humanity must shift from commodifying nature to ‘naturalizing’ our economy.

Interview with John D. Liu, February 4, 2016

RI: What is the significance of the Paris Agreement, reached at the COP21 Climate Summit in December (2015), for the pioneers, such as yourself, of the landscape restoration movement?

Liu: There is now recognition of soil carbon, which was not the case in the past. The best and perhaps only way for humanity to massively affect carbon disequilibrium in the atmosphere is to restore natural ecological function of soils through the restoration of biomass, biodiversity and accumulated organic matter.

One of the things that I have been learning about, and that has most impressed me, is the difference between natural systems, which have huge organic layers, and human systems, which are massively degraded and actually have lost their organic material.

In Paris, we’ve started to turn the corner. Instead of just talking about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we’re now seeing [climate change] spoken about as a holistic problem. When you see it holistically, you find out that CO2 and GHG emissions are a symptom of systematic dysfunction on a planetary scale… Human impact on the climate is not simply emissions; it is degradation.

There is a way forward. That is why I am so excited about the early work I did in the Loess Plateau and in Ethiopia, Rwanda and other countries. When you increase organic matter, you increase biomass and you protect biodiversity. You get a completely different result than if you just totally destroy those systems. So I don’t think that the political agreements go far enough, but they are starting to reflect reality, which is better than before.

RI: In Paris, RI encountered skepticism about the potential power of regenerative agriculture and landscape restoration to restore climate stability and feed the world. Can you tell us about your experience with the Loess Plateau restoration project in China and how it impacted your perspective on the potential of restoration?

Liu: There was a moment in the mid-1800s when Thomas Malthus reported that the rate of agricultural increase was happening arithmetically while human population growth was logarithmic. He posited huge famine and this pushed the development of industrial agriculture. But what I’ve seen is that this is based on huge assumptions and those assumptions are basically false. If you think that you can get higher productivity by reducing hydrological function, or the natural fertility in the land or the biodiversity of a biome then you are just sadly mistaken. You can get higher yields of monocultures for a short time but you ultimately destroy the basic fundamental viability of the entire system. So you are creating deserts. This is what happened in the Loess Plateau and this is what happened in every cradle of civilization.

It isn’t inevitable that human beings degrade these systems; we simply have to understand them. It is our understanding, our consciousness of these systems that determines what they look like. What I’ve noticed is that degraded landscapes are coming from human ignorance and greed. If you change that scenario to one of consciousness and generosity, you get a completely different outcome. And that is where we have to go, where we need to go. We are required to understand this. We have to act now as a species on a planetary scale. This has to become common knowledge for every human being on the planet. This has been our mission for the past 20-some years.

RI: Apart from the ecosystem benefits, the Loess Plateau project also helped lift 2.5 million people in four of the poorest provinces in China out of poverty. Is that correct?

Liu: Well, there are different ways to look at it because the Loess Plateau project influenced more than just the project areas. It changed national policy. Some of the negative behaviors, such as slope farming, tree cutting or free ranging of goats and sheep—behaviors that were devastating to biodiversity, biomass and organic material—were banned nationwide because of the work done on the Loess Plateau.

Landscape restoration does not only change ecological function, it changes the socio-economic function and when you get down to it, it changes the intention of human society. So if the intention of human society is to extract, to manufacture, to buy and sell things, then we are still going to have a lot of problems. But when we generate an understanding that the natural ecological functions that create air, water, food and energy are vastly more valuable than anything that has ever been produced or bought and sold, or anything that ever will be produced and bought and sold – this is the point where we turn the corner to a consciousness which is much more sustainable.

RI: It’s almost as if a global paradigm shift is needed to start accounting for nature in the economy. ‘Naturalizing’ the economy as you would say.

Liu: We have to be very careful not to commoditize nature. We need to naturalize the economy. What this means to me is that natural ecological functions are more valuable than ‘stuff.’ When we understand that, then the economy is based on ecological function. And that is exactly what we need in order to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, and to give every individual on the planet equal human rights. Suddenly we are in another paradigm. It’s similar to the shift from flat earth to round earth paradigm.

We need to realize that there is no ‘us and them.’ There is just us. There is one earth and one humanity. We have to act as a species on a planetary scale because we will all be affected by climate change. We have to come together to decide: What do we know? What do we understand? What do we believe as a species?

RI: Tell us about your work in Rwanda.

Liu: Rwanda is an interesting case study because of the 1994 genocide. This sort of a situation is ground zero. It is a reset. Every family, every person was affected. In 2006, I was invited to Rwanda by the British government and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). What I saw in my travels were bare hillsides, erosion and sediment loads in river systems. I presented my findings to the president, prime minister, parliament, cabinet, ministries of environment and agriculture, universities and press. We put films on TV. I explained each of these natural systems and what you have to do to correct it. And at the same moment in time, everyone in Rwanda was talking about ecological function.

Several weeks later, the government wrote me a letter saying thank you for coming to Rwanda to share your experiences. Then they wrote me a second letter, in which  they said we believe you and we’re rewriting our land use policy laws to reflect that economic development in Rwanda must be based on ecological function.

The measures Rwanda has taken have led to regeneration. They had food security when there was famine in East Africa. They have had increasing use of renewable energies and lessening of dependence on fossil fuels. If human beings can go to hell yet they can somehow come back and work to build a fair, equitable and sustainable society, that is a good thing. We need to watch carefully how Rwanda develops, as a lesson for the world.

RI: Can you tell us about the widespread detrimental impacts that industrial agriculture is having, particularly with regards to loss of biodiversity? Why is biodiversity essential to sustain life as we know it?

Liu: Evolutionary trends favor more biodiversity, more organic matter. The industrial or degenerative agriculture model favors less biodiversity, less biomass, less organic matter. This disrupts photosynthesis, hydrological regulation and moisture, temperature and it artificially elevates evaporation rates. Industrial agriculture sterilizes soil with UV radiation. It is just wrongheaded.

Humans went down the wrong path. But once we begin to understand these evolutionary trends, we understand that we have to get back in alignment with them. That is where regenerative agriculture and landscape restoration come in. We’ve seen the results at large scale and we’ve seen them on a smaller scale. This is the way forward for sequestration of carbon, this is the way forward for fertile healthy soils, this is the way forward for food security this is the way forward for meaningful work for everyone. We understand this. This is the basis of wealth and sustainability for humanity.

RI: If there were one behavior or habit of humans that you could magically change, what would it be?

Liu: It is clear right now that economics is driving today’s problems. There are a lot of assumptions in economics that are simply false. Economics now says that extraction, manufacturing, buying and selling can create wealth. This is bullshit. We are creating poverty by doing this. We are creating degradation of the landscapes. So few people in a tiny minority are accumulating vast material possessions in this system, while billions of people are living in abject poverty at the edges of large degraded ecosystems. Others can no longer even stay in their homes, and millions of people are migrating to escape from the horrible conditions. Well this cannot work. This must change.

What I have noticed is that ecological function is vastly more valuable that extraction, production, consumption, and buying and selling things. What we really need to understand is: “What is money?” If I were going to leave one thing for the people to think about it is this: What is money? What is it? It is basically a storehouse of value, a means of exchange, and a trust mechanism. That means it is an abstract concept; it can be anything that we want it to be. If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations survive. Our monetary system must reflect reality. We could have growth, not from stuff, but growth from more functionality. If we do that and we value that higher than things, we will survive.

***

Alexandra Groome is Campaign & Events Coordinator for Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.

Honduran Indigenous Leader Berta Cáceres Assassinated, Won Goldman Environmental Prize

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Honduran indigenous and environmental organizer Berta Cáceres has been assassinated in her home. She was one of the leading organizers for indigenous land rights in Honduras.

In 1993 she co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). For years the group faced a series of threats and repression.

According to Global Witness, Honduras has become the deadliest country in the world for environmentalists. Between 2010 and 2014, 101 environmental campaigners were killed in the country.

In 2015 Berta Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s leading environmental award. In awarding the prize, the Goldman Prize committee said, “In a country with growing socioeconomic inequality and human rights violations, Berta Cáceres rallied the indigenous Lenca people of Honduras and waged a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam.”

KEEP READING ON DEMOCRACY NOW!

We can save individual species — but can we save entire ecosystems?

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Author: Daniel Ackerman

The 1973 Endangered Species Act has rescued numerous individual species from extinction in the United States — think Rocky Mountain wolves or Florida crocodiles, for instance. But as the climate changes and humans continue to modify the landscape in a frenzy of plows, pastures and pavement, single species are not the only things in need of protection from extinction. Entire ecosystems — biological communities created through millions of years of evolutionary interactions between organisms — are at risk as well. Saving single species alone will not restore the intricate tapestry of relationships that shape ecosystems. To protect the habitat that supports those species and preserve services we humans rely on, from cleansing water for our cities and homes to buffering impacts of climate change, we need to save not just species, but also ecosystems, from extinction.

The concept of ecosystem extinction has been recognized for some time in the scientific literature, but is just now beginning to gain widespread application in land management. In fact, the International Union for Conservation of Nature — source of the Red List of Threatened Species, our planet’s premier “high alert” when species start going down the tubes — is developing a red list of endangered ecosystems, similar to its threatened species list.

Thanks largely to agriculture, tallgrass prairie has been reduced by 99 percent.

Among those most threatened are grasslands. Historically, these ecosystems served as valuable habitat for a spectrum of species and provided humans with natural plant- and animal-based foods, as well as wide-open spaces valued for aesthetics and recreation. Today the IUCN calls them “the most altered biome on the planet.” Tallgrass prairie, for example, once covered a Texas-sized swath of North America. From the Canadian Great Plains to the Oklahoman Panhandle, tallgrass prairie supported a diverse array of native plants, pollinating insects and large animals, from grizzlies to bison and elk. Thanks largely to agriculture, tallgrass prairie has been reduced by 99 percent down to a few slivers of road margins and sandy hills throughout the Midwest, now totaling an area smaller than Rhode Island.

KEEP READING ON ENSIA

How Forest Loss Is Leading To a Rise in Human Disease

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Author: Jim Robbins

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that the felling of tropical forests creates optimal conditions for the spread of mosquito-borne scourges, including malaria and dengue. Primates and other animals are also spreading disease from cleared forests to people.

In Borneo, an island shared by Indonesia and Malaysia, some of the world’s oldest tropical forests are being cut down and replaced with oil palm plantations at a breakneck pace. Wiping forests high in biodiversity off the land for monoculture plantations causes numerous environmental problems, from the destruction of wildlife habitat to the rapid release of stored carbon, which contributes to global warming.

But deforestation is having another worrisome effect: an increase in the spread of life-threatening diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. For a host of ecological reasons, the loss of forest can act as an incubator for insect-borne and other infectious diseases that afflict humans. The most recent example came to light this month in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases, with researchers documenting a steep rise in human malaria cases in a region of Malaysian Borneo undergoing rapid deforestation.

This form of the disease was once found mainly in primates called macaques, and scientists from the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene wondered why there was a sudden spike in human cases. Studying satellite maps of where forest was being cut down and where it was left standing, the researchers compared the patchwork to the locations of recent malaria outbreaks. They realized the primates were concentrating in the remaining fragments of forest habitat, possibly increasing disease transmission among their own populations. Then, as humans worked on the new palm plantations, near the recently created forest edges, mosquitoes that thrived in this new habitat carried the disease from macaques to people.

Keep Reading on Yale Environment 360

Crisis Response: When Trees Stop Storms and Deserts in Asia

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Author: Kathleen Buckingham 

This is the first installment of our Restoration Global Tour blog series. The series examines restoration success stories in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe and North America. Tune in over the coming months for additional installments, or check out our Restoration Diagnostic for more information.

A history of deforestation has made Asian nations like Vietnam, China and South Korea especially vulnerable to coastal storms, floods and sandstorms. Yet just as these nations have experienced similar crises, they’re also all pursuing a solution—restoring degraded landscapes.

In fact, reforestation, afforestation and changing agricultural policies have played a large role in bringing these countries from the brink to prosperity. WRI recently analyzed Asia’s restoration practices to inform the design of our Restoration Diagnostic, a method for evaluating existing and missing success factors for countries or landscapes with restoration opportunities.  Here’s a look at how these countries overcame disasters by restoring degraded land:

Protecting Mangroves in Vietnam

Vietnam has lost more than 80 percent of its mangrove forests since the 1950s. During the American War with Vietnam (1955–75), the U.S. military sprayed 36 percent of the mangroves with defoliant in order to destroy strongholds for military resistance. Since then, extensive areas have been converted into aquaculture, agricultural lands, salt beds and human settlements. More than 102,000 hectares (252,000 acres) of mangroves were cleared for shrimp farming from 1983 to 1987 alone.

With diminishing mangroves, the country’s coast became increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters like tropical cyclones.  Over the past 30 years, more than 500 people died or went missing every year due to natural disasters, thousands were injured, and annual economic losses totaled 1.5 percent of GDP.

Keep Reading on World Resources Institute

View the Map of Restoration Case Examples

Born to Rewild

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Author: Eli Kintisch

In April 2011, Nikita Zimov climbed into a heavy duty truck with six elk in the back and set out from Novosibirsk, a major city in southern Siberia, on a 4000-kilometer trek to the edge of the world. Time was not on his side. He had to reach the Arctic town of Cher-sky, where he and his father, Sergey, run a hardscrabble research outpost called the Northeast Science Station (NESS), before the spring thaw melted the frozen rivers that serve as winter roads in northern Siberia. White wooden crosses marked spots along the winding road where unlucky drivers had perished. Two weeks into his journey, just 40 kilometers from home, Zimov hit a snowbank—his brakes were shot—and the truck tipped over. Unscathed, he phoned his father and spent the next 4 hours, cold and exhausted, leaning against a flimsy tarp hat covered the truck’s roof to keep the elk, also uninjured, from bolting. “I was miserable,” he says. “Almost literally insane.”

Sergey swooped in to rescue Nikita and the elk, and the animals finally reached their destination: Pleistocene Park, a 14,000-hectare reserve near Chersky founded by the elder Zimov 19 years ago. It’s a grand experiment to test whether large herbivores—elk, moose, reindeer, horses, and bison—can, simply by grazing, bring back a grass-dominated ecosystem called the mammoth steppe. That biome dominated the northern reaches of Eurasia and North America for 2 million years, until the end of the last glacial period some 13,000 years ago, when  the landscape turned to mossy tundra and sparsely forested taiga.

If the Zimovs are right, a brighter future for the entire globe may hinge on the experiment’s success. A decade ago, Sergey and colleagues estimated that permafrost encircling the upper Northern Hemisphere contains a whopping 1 trillion tons of carbon—twice earlier estimates—and that this vast pool may be on the brink of leaking into the atmosphere. The finding was a clarion call to climate scientists to take the arctic carbon threat seriously. “This is the most dangerous territory in the world in terms of climate change,” Zimov declares.

Keep Reading in Science Magazine

San Francisco Is Now Using Firefighting Goats

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Author: Lydia O’Connor

Nestled between railroad tracks and a cement recycling plant in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood lives a little herd of urban goats with a big appetite for one of the only things that flourished in the the California drought: dry, fire-hazard brush.

Since 2008, City Grazing has been herding mixed-breed goats in the unlikely meadow and sending them on freelance assignments to eat up overgrowth everywhere from San Franciscans’ backyards to federal land in the Presidio. The landscaping goats are a green alternative to heavy machinery and pesticides and can easily graze steep hillsides, all while leaving behind a biodegradable fertilizer.

Starting last year, California’s driest year on record and host to the devastating Rim Fire, the company was inundated with calls asking about goat landscaping as a way to protect the land, City Grazing’s Genevieve Church told The Huffington Post.

“There’s been a definite increase in thoughts of, ‘How do we reduce fire hazard?’” she said. “When the number of wildfires increased in California in 2013, we began to get a lot more phone calls asking if goats were a viable option here … They’re the tried and true traditional method. Grazing animals have always been a wonderful way to keep grasslands and brushy areas reduced in that dry material.”

With triple the call volume, City Grazing decided to grow its goat family, and since January, around 50 baby goats, or kids, have been born into the herd and doubled its size. On Sunday, the company held an open house at the meadow where the public could watch a ceremonial “running of the goats” out to pasture.

Keep Reading in The Huffington Post

An Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Francis, on the Occasion of His Visit to Michoacán, Mexico, Winter Sanctuary of the Monarch Butterfly

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[ English | Español ]

February 16, 2016

Contact:

Ercilia Sahores, ercilia@organicconsumers.org, +52 (55) 6257 7901

Endorsed by Bipartisan Faith-Based, Indigenous, Environmental, Natural Health, Justice, Consumer and Farming Groups.

We welcome you and your message of “climate as the common good” to our country. We urge world leaders and ordinary citizens to honor your call to “hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” And to heed your advice to “adopt clear and firm measures in support of small producers” in order to address the ethical, economic, and environmental crises confronting humanity.

In Mexico, the center of origin of maize, nearly 60 varieties of this staple grain and hundreds of its subfamilies are at risk of extinction due to profit-driven corporations seeking to cultivate genetically modified (GMO) corn across Mexico. In 2013, the people responded by filing a civil lawsuit headed by 53 individuals from the scientific, farming, indigenous, consumer, artistic and environmental communities, as well as 20 nonprofit organizations.

For centuries, small farmers in Mexico cultivated their maize according to a regenerative agroecological farming system called the milpa. This proven system integrates a diverse variety of grains, pulses and vegetables, providing foundation for a healthy diet while simultaneously building soil fertility and supporting agrobiodiversity. We respectfully ask for your continued support in protecting regenerative organic food systems like the milpa, and the rights of “Every campesino…to possess a reasonable allotment of land where he can establish his home, work for subsistence of his family and a secure life.”

In order to protect small farmers, we must first acknowledge the connections between food, farming and climate change. As the largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions, the agriculture industry must be reformed in order fix the climate crisis.[1] According to the UN, a global transition from industrial agriculture to local ecological agriculture offers our best chance at mitigating the impacts of climate change on food security.[2] As you so aptly put it, “Climate change is a moral issue.” And we also humbly suggest that a global transition to regenerative agroecological food systems is an equally important moral issue.

In this country, as in so many others, the global spread of industrial agriculture and its use of petroleum-based fertilizers, agrotoxins and GMOs has devastated the health, biodiversity and sacred beauty of the world. A clear example of this devastation can be seen here in the state of Michoacán, winter sanctuary of the monarch butterfly. Over the past two decades, monarch populations have declined by 90 percent due primarily to the use of the herbicide glyphosate in Roundup Ready GMO crops, illegal logging and habitat loss.[3] Tragically, the few monarchs remaining may face an even greater challenge in the future; scientists indicate that rising temperatures due to climate change threaten to damage more than 70 percent of the monarch’s remaining winter habitat by the end of the century.[4] Fortunately, research has shown that regenerative organic systems can help to reverse rising temperatures by sequestering billions of tons of annual CO2 emissions back into the soil, while restoring agrobiodiversity (Rodale, 2014)[5].

We share your conviction that everything in the world is connected, and that to seek “only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.”

As world leaders prepare to gather here in Mexico for the COP13 Convention On Biodiversity in December, we ask you to continue to speak out about the role that industrial agriculture has played in destroying our soil, health and biodiversity, even as it has failed to alleviate world hunger.

There is a solution to food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss. We must opt for regenerative organic agriculture. The urgency of this problem demands that we join forces and work together to achieve change. We thank you for your courage and your commitment to the world’s poorest, and we accept your challenge to approach these complex crises by seeking solutions that not only protect nature, but also combat poverty and restore dignity to the excluded.

Sincerely,

La Asociación de Consumidores Orgánicos

Endorsing Groups:

Agua para la Vida, México
Agua para Tod@s, México
Anec, México
Asia Pacific Network for Food Sovereignty (APNFS), Philippines
Becket Films, USA
Beyond GM, United Kingdom
Beyond Pesticides Network Canada, Canada
Biodentistry, México
Biodiversity for a Liveable Climate, USA
Bosque Sustentable AC, México
Carnaval del Maíz, México
Cedar Circle Farm, USA
Center for Sustainable Medicine, USA
Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Francisco de Vitoria, México
Centro de la Tierra, México
CILAS, México
Circle Squared Foundation, The Netherlands
COBOSPO, México
Colectivo Zacahitzco, México
Colectivo Zócalo, México
Comunidades Campesinas y Urbanas, México
Cool Planet, USA
Dr. Pablo Jaramillo López, Ph.D. UNAM, (National Autonomous University of Mexico), México
FAT, México
Favianna Rodriguez Artist, USA
FIAN, México
Fundación Semillas de Vida AC, México
GEA, México
GMO Inside, USA
Greenpeace Mexico, México
Grupo Ecologico Sierra Gorda IAP, México
Grupo Vicente Gutierrez, Tlaxcala, México
Guereni Vendie, México
Kids Right to Know, Canada
Kiss the Ground, USA
LATINDADD, México
MAELA México, México
MaOGM, México
Milliones Against Monsanto, USA
Millones Contra Monsanto, México
NTC-SME, México
Nutiva, USA
Organic Consumers Association, USA
Pasticultores del Desierto, AC, México
People’s Lobby, USA
Programa Ambiental de la Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, México
Rainman Landcare Foundation, South Africa
RASA, México
Red Nacional de Género y Economía, México
Reg Maíz, México
Regeneration International, USA
RMALC, México
Shumei International, Japan
Sin Maíz No Hay País, México
SME, México
Spiral Farm House, Nepal
STUNAM, México
SUEUM, Michoacán, México
The Hummingbird Project, USA
The Rules, USA
UCCS, México
Valhalla Movement, Canada
Vía Orgánica AC, México
Viva Sierra Gorda, México
El Maíz Más Pequeño AC, México
Caminos de Agua AC, Mexico

[1] https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/ditcted2012d3_en.pdf

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?LangID=E&NewsID=16702

[3] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141010-monarch-butterfly-migration-threatened-plan/

[4] https://e360.yale.edu/feature/to_protect_monarch_butterfly_a_plan_to_save_the_sacred_firs/2942/

[5] https://rodaleinstitute.org/assets/RegenOrgAgricultureAndClimateChange_20140418.pdf