Author: IISD | Published: November 19, 2016
This event, moderated by Alexis Baden-Mayer, Organic Consumers Association, US, addressed the use of sustainable agricultural practices and landscape restoration as tools to address climate change, and contribute to negative carbon emissions.
Author: Lela Nargi | Published: November 15, 2016
Since 2008, deep inside a mountain on a permafrost-crusted archipelago near the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been open for business, soliciting and accepting sample seed collections from partner seed banks around the globe. Its mission? To preserve as much of the world’s crop diversity as possible, in order to ensure that our agricultural systems remain viable as climate change and other instabilities close in around us. To date, this one-of-a-kind facility—its location chosen partly because of its year-round cold temperatures—has received more than 860,000 seed samples from around the world.
The creation of the Vault was undertaken by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (now The Crop Trust), under the directorship of Cary Fowler, who has been a tireless advocate on behalf of food security for decades. With U.S. climate strides in danger of being unraveled and the future of our agricultural policy uncertain, Fowler discusses his new book about his work on the Vault, Seeds on Ice, what the Vault has managed to accomplish to date, and what work still remains to done.
Seeds on Ice was just published in September. What was the impetus for putting it together now?
There’s been a lot of media attention around the Seed Vault, but at a certain point, it occurred to me that the full story hadn’t been told. Mari Tefre is the only photographer who was there at beginning; she lived [in Svalbard] and covered the building of the Vault from start to finish. I wanted to put her photographs out there so everyone could see breadth of the project.
Would you call the Seed Vault a “success” so far?
What we’ve managed to do is collect a significant portion of the diversity, certainly of major crops in terms of cereal grains. As far as humanly possible, we’ve put an end to the extinction of crop diversity with what we have stored there. That’s pretty important.
Is there room to do more?
There will always be diversity we don’t have in the Vault. There are also crops whose diversity can’t be conserved through raising seeds, so there have to be other mechanisms for preserving them, ranging from field collections—having plants in fields that are tended—to tissue culture to the cryopreservation of tissue in liquid nitrogen. Sometimes people say, “Could you do those things at Svalbard?” No, not really. That facility is designed for the sole purpose of conserving seeds.
University of Illinois | Published: November 14, 2016
U of I researcher Ken Olson and his colleague from Iowa State University, Lois Wright Morton,n, have studied the seasonal Mississippi River flooding for over a decade. They’ve paid particularly close attention to the damages caused by major flooding events in 1993, 2011, and most recently in January 2016.
“Approximately 15,000 acres of farmland in the Dogtooth Bend area would no longer be accessible by road if the Mississippi River is allowed to realign naturally. In some cases the land use would likely shift from agriculture to other uses,” Olson explains.
Olson says climate scientists predict a continued pattern of extreme rainfall events in the upper Mississippi River region. This suggests that unexpected above-average rainfall events in the Ohio and Mississippi River basins will continue to increase the frequency of extreme flooding events.
“The 2016 Len Small levee breach was much more severe than 2011 because of its location,” says Olson. “The fast-moving river cut a 1-mile long breach in late December through early January, scouring out a crater lake and deep gullies info adjacent farmland. The southeast flow of the Mississippi River created a new channel connecting the old channel with the main stem of the river.”
Author: Aria McLauchlan | Published: November 18, 2016
Less than a year after launching in Paris at COP21, french Minister of Agriculture, Stéphane Le Foll kicked off the first official meeting of the “4 per 1000: Soils for Food Security and Climate” initiative (which champions the use of agricultural soils to act as a “carbon sink”), during an official side event of COP22 in Marrakech.
The meeting was organized into four distinct blocks: the Forum, “a consultation body” of the initiative’s participants and supporters, a Consortium, for determining strategic direction and governance (effectively a board of directors), a Scientific / Technical Committee, and the 4/1000 International Research Group.
The international agricultural and climate community showed enthusiastic support for the initiative, among nations and across sectors. Ministers of agriculture from Morocco and Spain joining Le Foll during the opening of the Consortium, as well as chief executives from the FAO of the UN and CGIAR. “I’m very happy to see how successful this initiative has become. We’ve got to keep the momentum going,” Le Foll announced.
An additional nine nations joined the initiative in the last year. There are now signatories from 34 nations, including Senegal which signed on during the day, and from hundreds of organizations from the civil society sector, businesses and research institutes.
The recognition of the global community’s growing consensus of the science supporting the vast potential of soils to sequester carbon, and the necessity of improving soil quality to ensure global food security was widely acknowledged throughout the day.
“COP22 has been dubbed the “COP of agriculture” and that is in large part due to the 4/1000 and its efforts to bring carbon sequestration to the forefront of the climate solutions conversation,” said Finian Makepeace, Director of Policy at Kiss the Ground.
Published: November 18, 2016
Speaking at COP22 in Marrakesh, 350.org activist Landry Ninteretse says African wildlife and food security are under threat. What the continent needs most from the West is not finance but an end to extractivism.
For the last two weeks, environmentalists and politicians from around the world have gathered in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh for the first COP climate change conference since the Paris Agreement in December.
This time, the talks are happening on the doorstep of communities already suffering the worst impacts of global warming. Swathes of the African continent, where the vast majority of the population is dependent on agriculture, are already seeing devastating droughts or flooding.
“If the Paris agreement isn’t implemented quickly enough the impact – in terms of agriculture, water sources, population displacement – are going to get worse and worse,” said Landry Nintereste, Africa-Arab Team leader at the environmental group 350.org.
Originally from Burundi, Nintereste has 10 years’ experience working with national, regional and international organizations towards just, science-based and local solutions to climate change.
“Climate change has destroyed the beauty of the African continent,” he said. Speaking to DW in Marrakesh he explained that biodiversity comes under pressure from changing climatic conditions. And human populations are living in increasingly precarious situations, too.
Author: Seble Samuel | Published: November 17, 2016
A year ago, Indigenous women from across Latin America began collecting local stories about how climate change is affecting their daily lives. They did this in order to craft solutions that aligned with their values.
Across their territories, this network of women is known as Chaski Warmi, meaning women messengers in Kichwa, a native language of the Andean region. Staying true to their name, these Aboriginal women, ranging from Guatemala to Chile, from Bolivia to Colombia and Ecuador, have brought their voices this month to the United Nations climate change negotiations in Marrakech. Together, they are proposing what they describe as an alternative development model. They say it would exert Indigenous rights and environmental justice as opposed to what they call “extractivism” or unsustainable development of resources.
As Indigenous women struggle on the frontlines of resource extraction and climate change, Ivonne Ramos – organiser with Chaski Warmi and coordinator of the Ecuadorian environmental organisation, Acción Ecológica – said that Chaski Warmi is part of the movement for justice, both human and environmental.
Here are some of their stories:
Author: Aly Abou-Sabaa | Published: November 17, 2016
From making jam with cactus fruit, to reviving traditional underground canals to defend against drought, Morocco has a leading role in the fight against climate change in Africa (PDF). One of its long-standing goals has been transforming agriculture to become more sustainable.
This vital sector, which contributes almost a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product, was the inspiration for the Green Morocco Plan, launched in 2008, to modernise agriculture and make it more productive and efficient. And that need remains as urgent as ever with the rising impact of global warming.
Climate-related challenges in agriculture are also common to many of Morocco’s African neighbours. Yet the biggest factor that continues to link experiences across the continent is a lack of investment to adapt and meet the growing demand for food in the face of rising temperatures.
This is why the Moroccan presidency of this year’s COP climate summit has made African agriculture one of its priorities when addressing climate change. For the first time, pan-African experts and officials meet to discuss their best solutions while making a united plea for $30bn to put them into action.
Such regional action has become critical, as talks to include agriculture in the climate negotiations have once again failed, and will now be postponed until May 2017.
In contrast to this lack of action on a global scale, we have seen at COP22 that there is no shortage of willingness to confront climate change in Africa. Every single African country has included adapting agriculture as part of their climate change strategies submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). What is missing is sufficient investment.
Published: November 18, 2016
Diplomatic wrangling this week will make the headlines in the fight against climate change, but experts say a bigger but largely unseen battle is set to unfold on the world’s farms.
Agriculture holds the double distinction of being highly vulnerable to climate change but also offering a solution to the problem, they say.
In a report ahead of the November 7-18 UN climate talks in Marrakesh, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had a blunt warning about the risks to the food supply from drought, flood, soil depletion, desertification and rising demand.
“There is no doubt climate change affects food security,” the agency’s chief, Jose Graziano da Silva, said.
“What climate change does is to bring back uncertainties from the time we were all hunter gatherers. We cannot assure any more that we will have the harvest we have planted.”
Crop volatility has been felt acutely this year, partly through El Niño—a weather phenomenon whose impact is seen by many scientists as a reflection of what future climate change may look like.
Harvests fell sharply in the breadbaskets of Latin America, North Africa and Europe, hit by exceptional drought or floods.
Over the coming dozen years or so, according to last month’s FAO report, farmers in developing countries will be the ones who bear the brunt of rising temperatures.
Published: November 16, 2016
A groundbreaking map of restoration opportunities along Africa’s Great Green Wall has been launched at the UN climate change conference, based on collection and analysis of crucial land-use information to boost action in Africa’s drylands to increase the resilience of people and landscapes to climate change.
“The Great Green Wall initiative is Africa’s flagship programme to combat the effects of climate change and desertification,” said Eduardo Mansur, Director of FAO’s Land and Water Division, while presenting the new map at the COP22 in Marrakech.
“Early results of the initiative’s actions show that degraded lands can be restored, but these achievements pale in comparison with what is needed,” he added during a high-level event at the African Union Pavilion entitled: “Resilient Landscapes in Africa’s Drylands: Seizing Opportunities and Deepening Commitments”.
Mansur hailed the new assessment tool used to produce the map as a vital instrument providing critical information to understand the true dimension of restoration needs in the vast expanses of drylands across North Africa, Sahel and the Horn.
Drawing on data collected on trees, forests and land use in the context of the Global Drylands Assessment conducted by FAO and partners in 2015-2016, it is estimated that 166 million hectares of the Great Green Wall area offer opportunities for restoration projects.
The Great Green Wall’s core area crosses arid and semi-arid zones on the North and south sides of the Sahara. Its core area covers 780 million hectares and it is home to 232 million people. To halt and reverse land degradation, around 10 million hectares will need to be restored each year, according to the assessment. This will be major a contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Author: Busani Bafana | Published: November 16, 2016
Bongekile Ndimande’s family lost more 30 head of cattle to a ravaging drought last season, but a herd of goats survived and is now her bank on four legs.
In money value, the drought deprived Ndimande of more than 21,000 dollars. Each goat would be worth an average of 714 dollars if they had survived in the dry, hot and rocky environment in her village of Ncunjana in the KwaZulu Natal Province, which has been stalked by a drought that swept across Southern Africa.
More than 40 million people are in need of food following one of the worst droughts ever in the region, with the Southern African Development Community launching a 2.8-billion-dollar emergency aid appeal.
Smallholder farmers in South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal Province have shifted to goat production to adapt to climate change. Their fortitude could be a success story for African agriculture in need of transformation to produce more food to feed more people but with fewer resources.
Livestock farmers like Ndimande are making good of a bad situation. They need help to cope with worsening extreme weather events which have led to increased food, nutrition and income security in many parts of Africa.
Adapting agriculture to climate change and climate financing are pressing issues at the seminal 22nd meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP 22) which opened this week in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. Morocco – already setting the pace in implementing the global deal to fight climate change through innovative projects – has unveiled the Adaptation of African Agriculture (AAA), a 30-billion-dollar initiative to transform and adapt African agriculture.