Tag Archive for: Climate Change

Could Soils Help Save the Climate?

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Soils are a double-edged climate sword. They are huge reservoirs of organic carbon and can act as a carbon sink. But they can also release CO2 into the atmosphere when used unsustainably.

Author: Irene Banos Ruiz | Published: February 6, 2018

Forests are often called the lungs of the planet because of the way they “breathe” in carbon dioxide. The role they play in locking in carbon dioxide is so essential UN schemes promote forests conservation as a way to offset greenhouse gas emissions.

Soils, meanwhile — less beautiful, and oft forgotten beneath our feet — get less press. Yet they hold 70 percent of the planet’s land-based carbon — four times as much as all the world’s biomass and three times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Agriculture is responsible for around 13 of global greenhouse gas emissions. But if farms managed their soils more sustainably, they could lower that share considerably, scientists say.

And not only would they emit less greenhouse gases — as carbon reservoirs, agricultural soils could even mop up carbon already in the atmosphere. And that’s a win-win situation because once in the soil, carbon fertilizes plants, boosting agricultural yields.

Carbon – a valuable resource

Plants absorb carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. Some is released back into the atmosphere and some is stored in plant matter. When that biomass is broken down by microorganisms in the soil, it becomes an organic material called humus, which nourishes plants and other organisms, conserves water and balances the soil’s pH level.

“This carbon is like the fuel for any soil,” Ronald Vargas, soils and land officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told DW.

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Agroforestry Systems May Play Vital Role in Mitigating Climate Change

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Agroforestry could play an important role in mitigating climate change because it sequesters more atmospheric carbon in plant parts and soil than conventional farming, according to Penn State researchers.

Author: Penn State | Published: February 1, 2018

An agricultural system that combines trees with crops and livestock on the same plot of land, agroforestry is especially popular in developing countries because it allows small shareholder farmers — who have little land available to them — to maximize their resources. They can plant vegetable and grain crops around trees that produce fruit, nuts and wood for cooking fires, and the trees provide shade for animals that provide milk and meat.

The researchers analyzed data from 53 published studies around the world that tracked changes in soil organic carbon after land conversion from forest to crop cultivation and pasture-grassland to agroforestry. While forests sequester about 25 percent more carbon than any other land use, agroforestry, on average, stores markedly more carbon than agriculture.

The transition from agriculture to agroforestry significantly increased soil organic carbon an average of 34 percent, according to Michael Jacobson, professor of forest resources, whose research group in the College of Agricultural Studies conducted the study. The conversion from pasture/grassland to agroforestry produced soil organic carbon increases of about 10 percent, on average.

“We showed that agroforestry systems play an effective role in global carbon sequestration, involved in carbon capture and the long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” he said. “The process is critical to mitigating or deferring global warming.”

However, carbon was not stored equally in different soil levels, noted lead researcher Andrea De Stefano, a graduate student at Penn State when the study was done, now at Louisiana State University. He pointed out that the study, which was published in December in Agroforestry Systems, provides an empirical foundation to support expanding agroforestry systems as a strategy to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and mitigate climate change.

“The conversion from forest to agroforestry led to losses in soil organic carbon stocks in the top layers, while no significant differences were detected when deeper layers were included,” De Stefano said.

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Farmland Could Be Used to Sustainably Offset America’s Entire Carbon Footprint—If the Will Exists

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Author: Dr. Louis Verchot | Published: January 24, 2018

Amid the roaring debate on how to curb climate change in Bonn last year, an impasse was finally broken on agriculture. Both a cause and casualty of climate change, our food system accounts for up to 24% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet hit by soaring temperatures and more frequent extreme weather, farming is becoming more difficult, as demand continues to increase.

Positive agricultural interventions could achieve up to 6% of reduction emissions needed to achieve the Paris Agreement goals—showing that this sector is not only part of the problem, but part of the solution to climate change.

Previously at climate talks, disagreement focussed on whether helping farmers adapt to climate change, or reducing the greenhouse gases produced by the sector should be prioritized, largely along developing vs. developed country lines.

Developed countries, already equipped with successful techniques for ramping up agricultural production, are more interested in mitigation, making existing techniques more climate-friendly. On the other hand, in developing countries, drought, floods, and hurricanes all play havoc with the mostly smallholder-driven agriculture sector. Their priority is to help those farmers adapt and find food security.

In Bonn at the latest round of climate talks, a compromise was reached to allow two technical bodies to work together to identify solutions on how the agriculture sector can be a part of the solution. The question is: where to begin? How can we rein in emissions in agriculture, while making farmers more resilient to the whims of the weather?

One solution stands out. Eighty-nine percent of agriculture’s future mitigation potential could lie in capturing carbon on farmland soils: carbon sequestration. Not only does this process suck harmful carbon out of the atmosphere, it makes soils healthier and more fertile for future food production, boosting resilience to climate change.

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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’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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Master Gardeners: Making a Difference in Climate Change

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Author: David Layland | Published: December 29, 2017

Climate change, also called global warming, has been in the news lately because of the devastating wildfires in Northern and Southern California. Climate change refers to the rise in average surface temperatures and is due primarily to the use of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into the air.

The gases trap heat within the atmosphere, which can have a range of effects on the environment, including rising sea levels, severe weather, and droughts that render landscapes more susceptible to wildfires.

There are two ways to reduce the environmental damage done by fossil fuels. The most common way is to reduce the use of fossil fuels — by driving a hybrid or electric car, for example, or using solar or wind power. The second way, carbon sequestration, involves pulling carbon out of the air and storing it in the ground.

I don’t drive a hybrid or electric car but I do have solar power. It provides 90 percent of my electricity at home so I’ve done something toward lowering emissions.

Carbon sequestration is new to me. In researching what I could do to help pull carbon out of the air, I discovered that I’m already using several carbon-sequestration practices in my garden. To some extent, these practices are what organic gardeners have been doing for a long time.

Make compost: One of the primary differences between organic and conventional gardening can be boiled down to a simple change in perspective: Instead of worrying about feeding the plants, we should worry first about feeding the soil. Take care of the soil and the plants will take care of themselves.

By composting all of our food scraps and garden waste, we aren’t just providing valuable nutrients for plants. We are providing food for a huge ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and insects, all of which help to absorb carbon from the environment and keep it locked up in the soil. You can add cardboard and other paper-based waste to your compost, too. High-fiber composting works, and it’s another way to lock up some CO2.

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Climate Scientists Unlock Secrets of ‘Blue Carbon’

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Results from soil survey could bolster efforts to monitor and protect wetlands around the globe.

Author: Jeff Tollefson | Published: January 9, 2018

Tidal wetlands come in many forms, but they could be more alike below the surface than anyone realized. Whether it’s a mangrove forest in Florida, a freshwater swamp in Virginia or a saltwater marsh in Oregon, the amount of carbon locked in a soil sample from each of these coastal ecosystems is roughly the same.

That’s the surprising message from a new analysis of some 1,900 soil cores collected around the United States during the past few decades. “In terms of carbon stocks, all tidal wetlands are very, very similar,” says Lisamarie Windham-Myers, an ecologist with the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, California, who is leading a 3-year, US$1.5-million assessment of coastal carbon funded by NASA. “The variability that everybody expected just doesn’t exist.”

Her team presented its findings last month in New Orleans, Louisiana, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union; the researchers plan to publish data from 1,500 soil cores online as early as this month, and hope to release information on the remaining 400 later this year.

The discovery could bolster efforts to assess and protect the world’s coastal wetlands. These ecosystems accumulate vast stocks of carbon that are released into the atmosphere when wetlands are destroyed. Development alters some 800,000 hectares of coastal wetlands around the world each year, sending roughly 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — double the carbon emissions of Spain in 2016.

Blue carbon

Over the past decade, scientists and policymakers have pushed to protect the carbon stored in coastal wetlands, known as blue carbon. The goal is to address climate change while protecting ecosystems that sustain fisheries, improve water quality and protect coastlines against storms. But raising money to support such efforts often requires determining precisely how much carbon these ecosystems hold, and how it accumulates over time.

Windham-Myers’s team reanalysed raw data from some 1,500 sediment cores collected over the past several decades, and 400 newer samples. The data showed a clear relationship: the density of soils decreased as the fraction of carbon in those soils increased, and vice versa. As a result, the amount of carbon in any given cubic metre of soil remained roughly the same, regardless of differences in vegetation, climate, topography or water chemistry across blue-carbon ecosystems.

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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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