Tag Archive for: environment

This Kansas Farmer Fought a Government Program to Keep His Farm Sustainable

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Author: Kristin Ohlson | Published on: December 5, 2016

December 5, 2016 — Editor’s note: This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a non-profit investigative news organization.

In 2012, Gail Fuller’s 2,000-acre farm was at ground zero for the drought that decimated corn production throughout the Midwest. His corn and soybeans had barely squeaked through the previous dry summer, even as many of his neighbors in Lyon County, Kansas, saw their crops desiccate and fail in the unrelenting sun. But when the drought persisted into 2012, Fuller joined the ranks of farmers who told the companies that administered their federally funded crop insurance they needed compensation for ruined acres.

On a hot day in early August, the company’s adjuster and his boss arrived to inspect Fuller’s land. Fuller and the adjuster greeted each other warmly — they had gone to high school together and the adjuster used to work for Fuller, spraying pesticides on his land. But Fuller grew uneasy when he saw the two men lingering over remnants of turnips and other brassicas he had grown to keep the soil healthy in between regular crops. Fuller had tried to kill off these cover crops before planting his market crop, as crop insurance rules require, but high winds interfered with the herbicide application and some of them survived. He feared the insurance company might not honor his claim because of restrictions the federal crop insurance program places on the use of cover crops.

Sure enough, the insurance company withheld a six-figure payout and canceled coverage on some of his fields. Stunned and panicked, Fuller called his partner, Lynette Miller, and blurted, “I’ve lost my insurance!”

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Building a ‘Good’ Anthropocene From the Bottom Up

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Author: Andrew C. Revkin | Published: October 6, 2016

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a determined cast of characters in academia aiming to identify paths to a good Anthropocene — Anthropocene being the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this span of human-dominated planetary history unfolding around us.

One such researcher is Elena M. Bennett, an ecosystem ecologist and geographer at McGill University. She’s the lead author of “Bright Spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene,” published in the October edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The paper describes an effort to identify and propagate social and environmental projects that could reverse a centuries-long pattern in which human prosperity has come at the cost of substantial harm to ecosystems and excluded communities.

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How 1 Company Is Helping Solve Clean Water Crisis

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: October 8, 2016

“Carbon for Water,” a film by Evan Abramson and Carmen Elsa Lopez, reveals a reality most people in the Western world cannot fathom — a world where a large portion of each day is devoted to finding drinkable water.

In the Western Province of Kenya, 90 percent of the population have no easy access to drinking water. In order to make the available water safe to drink, they must first search for firewood, and then boil the water.

Alas, firewood is an equally scarce commodity, and locals resort to illegally cutting down and stealing wood from the ever-dwindling forest — a practice said to contribute to deforestation, which makes the threat of water shortage even more severe.

At present, Kenya’s forest covers less than 2 percent of the land, but as noted by the filmmakers:1

“Just six or seven decades ago a beautiful forest covered most of Western Province. Today, a lot of the forest is gone. Forest degradation and the reduction of rainfall are connected.

Once the forest is destroyed, the rainfall is reduced. In order to avoid conflicts that might lead to civil wars, Kenya’s forests need to be protected urgently, but that can’t happen if people rely on firewood to boil the water they need to drink.”

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Appeal to the Representatives of Nations and International Institutions Meeting in Marrakech

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Author: Slow Food | Published: November, 2016

The 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 22) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held in Marrakech from November 7 to 18, 2016. The first objective of the Marrakech conference will be to start work on the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

In the run-up to this event, which will put the climate at the center of global political debate, attention is focused on the energy, heavy industry and transport sectors, while the relationship between food and climate still has a more marginal role in discussions.

And yet, as Slow Food has already pointed out in the document it produced last year for COP 21, not only does food production represent one of the main causes—and victims—of climate change, it could also become one of the solutions.

The profound connection between agriculture and climate change is also highlighted by this years’s State of Food and Agriculture report from the FAO, which states that the agricultural sector is currently responsible for a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, deriving primarily from the conversion of forests to agricultural land, as well as from animal and plant production.

According to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, the planet’s average temperature has risen by 0.85°C in the last 100 years. Monthly heat records were broken for a record 15th month in a row between April 2015 and July 2016, and forecasts leave little hope for improvement in the future. According to climate simulation models, without limits on greenhouse gas emissions the average temperature could rise by up to 5°C by the end of the century, but a rise of even 2°C would bring devastating environmental and social consequences. Once unusual phenomena, such as extreme heatwaves, floods, droughts and hurricanes are becoming more commonplace, and biodiversity is being eroded at an unprecedented rate. Meanwhile, the rising temperature of the oceans and their increasing acidification is undermining their capacity to stabilize the climate.

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Resiliencia en la COP22

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Por: Ercilia Sahores | Fecha: 10 Noviembre 2016

Cada año diferentes términos son utilizados una y otra vez en las reuniones de las Conferencias de las Partes (COP) que organiza las Naciones Unidas sobre cambio climático. Generalmente estos términos están ligados a los estadios de planeamiento y desarrollo de las COP. Lima en 2014 fue la COP de la negociación, París en diciembre del año pasado fue la COP de decisiones. En la primera se habló de compromisos e intenciones, en la segunda, de iniciativas y propuestas. En la COP22, que ha comenzado el 7 de noviembre en Marrakech, Marruecos, se habla mucho de implementación y puesta en práctica, por aquello de que ésta es la COP de la acción.

En la zona verde de la COP, donde se reúnen, exponen y tienen stands múltiples organizaciones de la sociedad civil, hay un espacio dedicado a la iniciativa triple A. Esta iniciativa: “Adaptación de la Agricultura Africana al cambio climático”, busca poner a África, la agricultura y la adaptación como ejes dentro de las negociaciones internacionales de la COP y convertir ese continente en receptor de numerosos fondos destinados a mitigar el cambio climático.

En muchas de las conferencias que tienen lugar en la zona de la AAA, se escuchan también términos y definiciones recurrentes. Se habla, por ejemplo, de evitar la agricultura de minería, meramente extractivista; se usa como un mantra el término seguridad alimentaria; se insiste en la necesidad de acompañar a la naturaleza en sus procesos y dejar de lado la arrogancia del ser humano de creer que puede anticiparse al dinamismo propio de la misma.

Uno de los términos a los que más he prestado atención, en la COP en general, pero en el contexto de AAA en particular, es resiliencia. La palabra resiliencia tiene su origen en el idioma latín; etimológicamente, resilio significa volver de un salto, rebotar. En el campo de la sociología, la ciencia política y la psicología, se ha aplicado a aquellas personas que habiendo pasado por situaciones de vulnerabilidad, riesgo o trauma, tienen la capacidad de sobreponerse, pueden, de alguna manera, “rebotar”.

En el contexto de la agricultura, un suelo resiliente es aquel que tiene la capacidad de sobreponerse mejor a situaciones climáticas adversas, que en el contexto actual de cambios y desastres climáticos puede ir desde una sequía prolongada a una inundación inesperada. Existen múltiples maneras de aumentar la resiliencia del suelo, del mismo modo que existen múltiples maneras de incrementar la resiliencia de la sociedad.

En esto pensaba ayer, ya al mediodía de Marruecos, donde la noticia de la victoria de Trump nos había agarrado casi despertando. Pensaba acerca de la necesidad de construir una mayor resiliencia social y ecológica. En la importancia de crear redes, unirnos y protegernos ante la adversidad.

Es posible que lo que venga sea como un huracán, que afecte no sólo a Estados Unidos, sino que a su paso haga daño al mundo entero. Pero la medida en que pueda afectarnos estará dada por nuestra capacidad de defendernos y construir resiliencia, nuestra capacidad de salir del trauma y volver, plenos, a reconstituirnos como sociedad.

Espero que en la COP22 haya mucho más que palabras y que la implementación y la acción favorezca realmente a quienes tiene que hacerlo: a quienes son más vulnerables y están más expuestos. Entretanto y en el albor de un nuevo orden mundial, nos corresponde mirarnos a los ojos, tender manos y puentes solidarios, es ahora que tenemos que crear resiliencia, para poder salir del trauma.

Life on the Edge of a Habitat Is Dangerous

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Author: Helmholtz Centre For Environmental Research | Published: October 20, 2016

The transition of climate and land use has resulted in more and more animals and plants being forced back into ever smaller habitats, which are ever further apart. In the center of their range, they can populate a wide range of habitats, but on the edge they need special biotopes with particularly favorable characteristics. Species with particular needs find it especially difficult to overcome the distances between these refuges. So they are often only to be found in small, isolated populations, with little contact between them. The genetic variability of their members is therefore correspondingly low. “For that reason, such populations adjust badly to new climatic conditions, parasites or other challenges,” explains Prof. Klaus Henle from the UFZ. The risk of extinction increases.

Populations at the edge of a range are therefore more specialised and more sensitive. In this context, do they also react more sensitively to fragmentation than members of the same species in the center? Previously, such comparisons had only been drawn between different species. Nobody knew whether these differences also existed within the same species. Klaus Henle and his colleagues have now investigated using the example of the sand lizard.

The small reptiles, found from central France to Lake Baikal, and from southern Sweden to the Balkans, have a preference for relatively open landscapes with individual trees and shrubs. That could be, for example, dry grassland, moorland or embankments. So that it does not get too hot for them, they need more shady vegetation in their more southerly areas of distribution than in central Europe. In Scandinavia, on the other hand, they restrict themselves to particularly warm and sunny locations.

The Sand Lizard Example

In order to test their hypothesis — that animals of one species living in the center of their range handle fragmentation of their habitats better than those on the periphery — the researchers investigated five sand lizard populations in Sofia, at the most southern edge of the range of this species, and eleven populations in Leipzig, which is more or less in the middle of the lizards’ range. “In both cities, the animals are confronted with fragmentation,” says Klaus Henle. Since the end of the 20th century, Sofia has seen a veritable boom in construction. This has meant that in the last ten to fifteen years, not only have many green spaces in the Bulgarian capital given way to residential and industrial areas, but in addition, the large parks have been divided up by new buildings, meaning that individual areas, along with their scaly residents, are now isolated from one another. Although in Leipzig about half the area of the city still consists of green spaces, not nearly all of them offer suitable lizard habitats. In the Saxon city, too, there are therefore populations that live more than four kilometres apart. But based on previous experience, the small reptiles can hardly manage larger distances.

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The Secret Life of Trees: The Astonishing Science of What Trees Feel and How They Communicate

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Author: Maria Popova

“A tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.”

Trees dominate the world’s the oldest living organisms. Since the dawn of our species, they have been our silent companions, permeating our most enduring tales and never ceasing to inspire fantastical cosmogonies. Hermann Hesse called them “the most penetrating of preachers.” A forgotten seventeenth-century English gardener wrote of how they “speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.”

But trees might be among our lushest metaphors and sensemaking frameworks for knowledge precisely because the richness of what they say is more than metaphorical — they speak a sophisticated silent language, communicating complex information via smell, taste, and electrical impulses. This fascinating secret world of signals is what German forester Peter Wohlleben explores in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (public library).

Wohlleben chronicles what his own experience of managing a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany has taught him about the astonishing language of trees and how trailblazing arboreal research from scientists around the world reveals “the role forests play in making our world the kind of place where we want to live.” As we’re only just beginning to understand nonhuman consciousnesses, what emerges from Wohlleben’s revelatory reframing of our oldest companions is an invitation to see anew what we have spent eons taking for granted and, in this act of seeing, to care more deeply about these remarkable beings that make life on this planet we call home not only infinitely more pleasurable, but possible at all.

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Agriculture Must Transform to Feed a Hotter, More Crowded Planet, UN Says on World Food Day

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Author: UN News Centre | Published on: October 16, 2016

To mark World Food Day 2016, the United Nations is highlighting the close links between climate change, sustainable agriculture, and food and nutrition security, with the message: “The climate is changing. Food and agriculture must, too.”

“As the global population expands, we will need to satisfy an increasing demand for food,” said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message commemorating the Day.

“Yet, around the world, record-breaking temperatures, rising sea levels and more frequent and severe droughts and floods caused by climate change are already affecting ecosystems, agriculture and society’s ability to produce the food we need,” he added.

Mr. Ban pointed out that the most vulnerable people are world’s poorest, 70 per cent of whom depend on subsistence farming, fishing or pastoralism for income and food.

“Without concerted action, millions more people could fall into poverty and hunger, threatening to reverse hard-won gains and placing in jeopardy our ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” he emphasized.

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Feeding the World

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Authors: Anne Weir Schechinger & Craig Cox | Published on: October 5, 2016

The United Nations has forecast that world food production must double to feed 9 billion people by 2050. That assertion has become a relentless talking point in the growing debate over the environmental, health and social consequences of American agriculture.

America’s farmers, we are told, must double their production of meat products and grains to “feed the world.” Otherwise, people will go hungry.

Agribusinesses such as Monsanto sometimes cite the so-called “moral imperative” to feed a hungry world in order to defend the status-quo farm policy and deflect attention from the destruction that “modern” agriculture is inflicting on the environment and human health.

The real experts know better. Jose Graziano da Silva, director-general of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization argues instead that the current conditions of “modern” agriculture are “no longer acceptable.”

The key to ending world hunger while protecting the environment is to help small farmers in the developing world increase their productivity and income, and to promote “agro-ecology” everywhere, including in the U.S.

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Young People’s Burden

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Author: James Hansen | Published on: October 4, 2016

Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions, by twelve of us[1], is being made available as a “Discussion” paper in Earth System Dynamics Discussion on 4 October, as it is undergoing peer review.   We try to make the science transparent to non-scientists.  A video discussion by my granddaughter Sophie and me is available.  Here I first note a couple of our technical conclusions (but you can skip straight to “Principal Implications” on page 2):

1) Global temperature: the 12-month running-mean temperature is now +1.3°C relative to the 1880-1920 average in the GISTEMP analysis (Fig. 2 in above paper or alternative Fig. 1 below).  We suggest that 1880-1920 is a good choice for “preindustrial” base period; alternative choices would differ by only about ±0.1°C, and 1880-1920 has the advantage of being the earliest time with reasonably global coverage and reasonably well-documented measurement technology.

Present 12-month running-mean global temperature jumps about as far above the linear trend line (Fig. 2b in the paper) as it did during the 1997-98 El Nino.  The linear trend line is now at +1.06°C, which is perhaps the best temperature to compare to paleoclimate temperatures, because the latter are “centennially-smoothed,” i.e., the proxy measures of ancient temperature typically have a resolution not better than 100 years.  The present linear trend (or 11-year mean) temperature is appropriate for comparison to centennially smoothed paleo temperature, because we have knowledge that decadal temperature will not be declining in the next several decades.

 

2) The growth of the three principal human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs: CO2, CH4, N2O) are all accelerating.  Contrary to the impression favored by governments, the corner has not been turned toward declining emissions and GHG amounts.  The world is not effectively addressing the climate matter, nor does it have any plans to do so, regardless of how much government bureaucrats clap each other on the back.

On the other hand, accelerating GHG growth rates do not imply that the problem is unsolvable or that amplifying climate feedbacks are now the main source of the acceleration.  Despite much (valid) concern about amplifying climate-methane feedbacks and leaks from “fracking” activity, the isotopic data suggest that the increase of CH4emissions is more a result of agricultural emissions.  Not to say that it will be easy, but it is still possible to get future CH4 amount to decline moderately, as we phase off fossil fuels as the principal energy source.

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