Tag Archive for: Impact of Agriculture on Climate

Industrial Farming is Driving the Sixth Mass Extinction of Life on Earth, Says Leading Academic

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‘Re-imagining a world with less stuff but more joy is probably the way forward,’ says Professor Raj Patel

Author: Ian Johnston | Published: August 26, 2017

Industrial agriculture is bringing about the mass extinction of life on Earth, according to a leading academic.

Professor Raj Patel said mass deforestation to clear the ground for single crops like palm oil and soy, the creation of vast dead zones in the sea by fertiliser and other chemicals, and the pillaging of fishing grounds to make feed for livestock show giant corporations can not be trusted to produce food for the world.

The author of bestselling book The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy will be one of the keynote speakers at the Extinction and Livestock Conference in London in October.

Organised by campaign groups Compassion in World Farming and WWF, it is being held amid rising concern that the rapid rate of species loss could ultimately result in the sixth mass extinction of life. This is just one reason why geologists are considering declaring a new epoch of the Earth, called the Anthropocene, as the fossils of soon-to-be extinct animals will form a line in the rocks of the future.

The last mass extinction, which finished off the dinosaurs and more than three-quarters of all life about 65 million years ago, was caused by an asteroid strike that sent clouds of smoke all around the world, blocking out the sun for about 18 months.

Prof Patel, of the University of Texas at Austin, said: “The footprint of global agriculture is vast. Industrial agriculture is absolutely responsible for driving deforestation, absolutely responsible for pushing industrial monoculture, and that means it is responsible for species loss.

“We’re losing species we have never heard of, those we’ve yet to put a name to and industrial agriculture is very much at the spear-tip of that.”

Speaking to The Independent, he pointed to a “dead zone” – an area of water where there is too little oxygen for most marine life – in the Gulf of Mexico that has grown to the same size as Wales because of vast amounts of fertiliser that has washed from farms in mainland US, into the Mississippi River and then into the ocean.

“That dead zone isn’t an accident. It’s a requirement of industrial agriculture to get rid of the sh*t and the run-off elsewhere because you cannot make industrial agriculture workable unless you kick the costs somewhere else,” he said.

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Farmland Can Sequester Carbon From the Atmosphere

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Author: Jan Sluizer | Published: August 21, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO —
California rancher John Wick says the Marin Carbon Project could help save the world from climate change.

“How would you possibly know, looking out at this beautiful day in front of us, that the Earth is crashing?” he asks, rhetorically. “But when scientists measure it and see the effect of it, and watch the ocean die-off and everything happening, this is scary as hell. And, then, we have evidence that there might be something that could stop that. And, then, we had measurement of something that holds promise to actually reverse it.”

That “something” is carbon farming, using processed compost to cool the Earth. It’s a theory developed by rangeland ecologist Jeff Creque, who also promotes beneficial land management practices to increase the health of agricultural systems.

“Agriculture is the art of moving carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the vegetation to the soil and, then, back again,” he says, explaining, “If we can increase the rate of carbon capture and decrease the rate of carbon loss, we can actually begin to bend that Keeling curve of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the other direction, which is what we need to achieve.”

Wick met the ecologist when he turned to him for help restoring his ranchland, which had been overgrazed by cattle, and overrun with invasive weeds and brush. After implementing a strategic grazing disruption plan Creque designed, deep-rooted native flora gradually returned to the property.

Wick was now a firm believer in Creque’s theories, and to prove them, they founded the Marin Carbon Project. In December, 2008, they covered a carbon-depleted test plot on Wick’s land with one and a quarter centimeters of processed compost, next to another grazed test plot without compost. They wanted to see if the compost-treated land would pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester durable carbon during photosynthesis.

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CGIAR Gets Serious About Soil Carbon as Home of 4p1000 Initiative

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CGIAR will host 4p1000, a new initiative which places soils at the heart of climate solutions

Author: Alain Vidal | Published: August 23, 2017

To help us halt the warming of our world, it is time to take a good look beneath our feet. Capturing soil carbon in soils is one of our best bets for mitigating significant greenhouse gas emissions.

At the recent Eat Forum in Stockholm, Johan Rockström and Walter Willet reminded us of this in their State of People and the Planet speech, which highlighted that reaching the Paris Agreement goal will be challenging and require an ‘agrarian revolution’, where our food system becomes part of a global roadmap for rapid decarbonization. Sequestering more carbon in the soil is an option that would significantly contribute to meeting the Paris Agreement goal.

However, we still lack the knowledge needed to sustainably manage soil for carbon sequestration. Launched during COP21 under the leadership of the French Government, the global 4p1000 initiative is currently rallying effort to overcome this gap.

On paper, a 0.4% annual growth rate of carbon stored in soils would make it possible to stop the present increase in atmospheric CO2. In the real world of agricultural and forest soils, this target may be difficult to reach or limited in time, but any effort towards storing carbon in soils or halting carbon release, especially from agricultural soils, would dramatically move our food system from the ‘bench of culprits’ to part of the solutions to mitigate climate change.

But there is more. Farmers and agronomists have known for centuries that more carbon in soils means more fertility, less erosion and better water storage. This means better adaptation to increased climate variability and better income for farmers, yielding better food and nutrition security, especially in the developing world.

The 4p1000 secretariat is now hosted by the CGIAR System Organization, under an agreement signed in Montpellier on 29 June, 2017. The initiative provides a multi-stakeholder platform to facilitate partnerships, bringing together more than 250 contributors in both the public and private sectors under the framework of the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA) of the UNFCCC. The initiative will promote research-based solutions along four pillars:

• a multi-stakeholder platform to facilitate partnerships
• a tool to assess projects based on a set of references and indicators
• an international research program exploring the potential of soil carbon sequestration, innovative soil practices, the required enabling environment, and the monitoring, reporting and verification of solutions
• a digital resources center on carbon in soils

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Future Policy Award 2017: Desertification

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Published: August, 2017

Future Policy Award 2017: Celebrating best policies to combat desertification

We must not let our future dry out! These seven laws and policies demonstrate that land restoration can be a reality. They work towards a land degradation-neutral world as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goal 15, and tackle desertification, one of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Desertification and land degradation are a threat to food security, livelihoods and health of hundreds of millions of people. It is estimated that 135 million people are at risk of being displaced by desertification, and drylands are the most conflict-prone regions of the world. Climate change, and the increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather in arid lands, makes combating desertification even more vital.

In partnership with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the 2017 Future Policy Award highlights laws and policies that effectively address land and soil degradation, and the related risks to food security and livelihoods, and help secure a sustainable and just future for people living in the world’s drylands.

The Winners

GOLD
Ethiopia, Tigray Region: Conservation-Based Agricultural Development-Led Industrialization (1994), supported by Mass Mobilization Campaigns (1991) and the Youth Responsive Land Policy (2008)

The Tigray region’s interpretation of Ethiopia’s development strategy focuses on food self-sufficiency and economic growth by conserving land and promoting sustainable agriculture. Thanks to a unique combination of collective action, voluntary labour and the involvement of youth, the people of Tigray are restoring land on a massive scale.

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Ethiopia’s Tigray Region Bags Gold Award for Greening Its Drylands

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Author: Alex Whiting | Published: August 22, 2017

Tigray has managed to improve soil and water conservation, and closed off 1.2 mln hectares of land to allow plants to regrow

ROME, Aug 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A major project to restore land in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region to boost millions of people’s ability to grow food won gold on Tuesday in a U.N.-backed award for the world’s best policies to combat desertification and improve fertility of drylands.

Tigray’s drylands, home to more than 4.3 million people, are being restored on a massive scale, said the World Future Council, a foundation which organised the award together with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

The Tigray government has mobilised villagers to volunteer 20 days a year to build terraces, irrigation projects, build stone walls on mountains and hillsides, and other projects.

As a result, groundwater levels have risen, soil erosion has reduced, and people’s ability to grow food and gain an income has improved, the council said.

“Ethiopia’s Tigray region shows that restoration of degraded land can be a reality … The model provides hope for other African countries to follow suit,” Alexandra Wandel, director of the World Future Council, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Drylands, which cover nearly 40 percent of the Earth’s land, are particularly vulnerable to losing fertility through changes in climate and poor land use such as deforestation or overgrazing, the UNCCD said.

“Hundreds of millions of people are directly threatened by land degradation, and climate change is only going to intensify the problem,” Monique Barbut, under-secretary-general of the United Nations and UNCCD executive secretary said in a statement.

“So far, this underestimated environmental disaster has received far too little attention.”

Ethiopia’s Tigray region has, however, since 1991 managed to improve soil and water conservation, and closed off 1.2 million hectares of land to allow plants to regrow.

“The Tigray region of Ethiopia is now greener than it has ever been during the last 145 years,” said Chris Reij, desertification expert at the World Resources Institute.

“This is not due to an increase in rainfall, but due to human investment in restoring degraded land to productivity.”

Over about 15 years, men, women and children moved at least 90 million tonnes of soil and rock by hand to restore their landscapes on about 1 million hectares, Reij said.

“In the process many communities have overcome the impacts of climate change,” he said.

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World’s Soils Have Lost 133bn Tonnes of Carbon Since the Dawn of Agriculture

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Author: Daisy Dunne | Published: August 25, 2017 

The study, which maps where soil carbon has been lost and gained since 10,000BC, shows that crop production and cattle grazing have contributed almost equally to global losses.

Understanding how agriculture has altered soil carbon stocks is critical to finding ways to restore lost carbon to the ground, another scientist tells Carbon Brief, which could help to buffer the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere.

Soil as a carbon sink

The top metre of the world’s soils contains three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, making it a major carbon sink alongside forests and oceans.

Soils play a key role in the carbon cycle by soaking up carbon from dead plant matter. Plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and pass carbon to the ground when dead roots and leaves decompose.

But human activity, in particular agriculture, can cause carbon to be released from the soil at a faster rate than it is replaced. This net release of carbon to the atmosphere contributes to global warming.

New research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (pdf), estimates the total amount of carbon that has been lost since humans first settled into agricultural life around 12,000 years ago.

The research finds that 133bn tonnes of carbon, or 8% of total global soil carbon stocks, may have been lost from the top two metres of the world’s soil since the dawn of agriculture. This figure is known as the total “soil carbon debt”.

Around two-thirds of lost carbon could have ended up in the atmosphere, while the rest may have been transported further afield before being deposited back into the soil.

And since the industrial revolution, the rate of soil carbon loss has increased, says lead author Dr Jonathan Sanderman, a scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. He tells Carbon Brief:

“Considering humans have emitted about 450bn tonnes of carbon since the industrial revolution, soil carbon losses to the atmosphere may represent 10 to 20% of this number. But it has hard to calculate exactly how much of this has ended up in the atmosphere versus how much has been transported due to erosion.”

‘Hotspots’ for carbon loss

As part of the study, the researchers designed an artificially intelligent model that used an existing global soil dataset to estimate past levels of soil carbon stocks, Sanderman says.

“We used a dataset which defines 10,000BC as a world without a human footprint. What we did was develop a model that could explain the current distribution of soil carbon across the globe as a function of climate, topography [physical features], geology and land use. Then we replaced current land use with historic reconstructions including the ‘no land use’ case to get predictions of soil carbon levels back in time.”

To calculate an overall soil carbon debt, the researchers subtracted the amount of current global soil carbon from the amount of soil carbon predicted to have existed in the era before human agriculture. The model also allowed the researchers to estimate global soil carbon stocks at different points throughout history, including at the advent of the industrial revolution.

The results allow scientists to get a clearer picture on how 12,000 years of human agriculture have affected the world’s soil stocks, says Sanderman.

“More carbon has been lost due to agriculture than has generally been recognised and a lot of this loss predated the industrial revolution. This loss isn’t equally distributed across agricultural land. Some regions stand out as having lost the most carbon.”

Map B below shows the regions that have experienced the most soil carbon loss, and includes the US corn belt and western Europe. The red shading represents the very highest level of soil carbon loss since 10,000BC, while blue shows the highest level of carbon gain. 

The US corn belt and western Europe are likely to have experienced high levels of soil carbon loss as a result of long periods of intense crop production, says Sanderman.

However, the analysis also reveals a number of regions which have seen high levels of soil carbon loss despite having relatively little farming. These “hot spots” – including the rangelands of Argentina, southern Africa and parts of Australia – are considered to be particularly vulnerable to land degradation driven by agriculture, says Sanderman.

“Semi-arid and arid grasslands [the hotspots] are particularly vulnerable to potentially irreversible degradation if grazing intensity is too high. That’s because there isn’t a lot of soil carbon to start with and there can often be a complete shift in vegetation cover leading to lots of erosion.”

Map A shows the distribution and intensity of crop production (red) and cattle grazing (green) across the world. Both have contributed almost equally to loss of soil carbon stocks, Sanderman says.

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This Is Why When You Talk About Climate Change, You Can’t Ignore Agriculture

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Author: Chelsea Harvey | Published: August 23, 2017 

Agriculture has historically released almost as much carbon into the atmosphere as deforestation, a new study suggests — and that’s saying something.

In a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that land use changes associated with planting crops and grazing livestock have caused a loss of 133 billion tons of carbon from soil worldwide over the last 12,000 years, amounting to about 13 years of global emissions at their current levels. And at least half of those losses have probably occurred in the last few centuries.

“Historically, I think we’ve underestimated the amount of emissions from soils due to land use change,” said lead study author Jonathan Sanderman, an associate scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center, a climate change research organization based in Massachusetts.

The researchers suggest that the findings could be used to help target the places around the world that have lost the most soil carbon, and where restoration efforts — which aim to help store carbon back in the ground through sustainable land management — might make the greatest difference. It’s a strategy many scientists have suggested could be used to help fight climate change.

“We have known that extensive agricultural practices are responsible for depleting soil carbon stocks, but the full extent of these carbon losses has been elusive,” said soil expert Thomas Crowther, who will be starting a position as a professor of global ecosystem ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in October, in an email to The Washington Post. “In this study, the authors do a really good job of quantifying how humans have altered the Earth’s surface soil carbon stocks through extensive agriculture, with direct implications for atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the climate.”

Previously, studies on global soil carbon losses have varied wildly in their conclusions, suggesting historical losses of anywhere from 25 billion to 500 billion tons of carbon, Sanderman noted. In general, based on the average findings from multiple studies, scientists have often assumed a total loss of around 78 billion tons, he added.

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Meat Industry Blamed for Largest-Ever ‘Dead Zone’ in Gulf of Mexico

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Author: Oliver Milman | Published: August 1, 2017

A new report shows toxins from suppliers to companies like Tyson Foods are pouring into waterways, causing marine life to leave or die

The global meat industry, already implicated in driving global warming and deforestation, has now been blamed for fueling what is expected to be the worst “dead zone” on record in the Gulf of Mexico.

Toxins from manure and fertiliser pouring into waterways are exacerbating huge, harmful algal blooms that create oxygen-deprived stretches of the gulf, the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay, according to a new report by Mighty, an environmental group chaired by former congressman Henry Waxman.

It is expected that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will this week announce the largest ever recorded dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It is expected to be larger than the nearly 8,200 square-mile area that was forecast for July – an expanse of water roughly the size of New Jersey.

Nutrients flowing into streams, rivers and the ocean from agriculture and wastewater stimulate an overgrowth of algae, which then decomposes. This results in hypoxia, or lack of oxygen, in the water, causing marine life either to flee or to die.

Some creatures, such as shrimp, suffer stunted growth. Algal blooms themselves can cause problems, as in Florida last summer when several beaches were closed after they became coated in foul-smelling green slime.

America’s vast appetite for meat is driving much of this harmful pollution, according to Mighty, which blamed a small number of businesses for practices that are “contaminating our water and destroying our landscape” in the heart of the country.

“This problem is worsening and worsening and regulation isn’t reducing the scope of this pollution,” said Lucia von Reusner, campaign director at Mighty. “These companies’ practices need to be far more sustainable. And a reduction in meat consumption is absolutely necessary to reduce the environmental burden.”

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Here’s What Indonesia Is Doing About Haze From Forest and Peatland Fires

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Author: Nithin Coca | Published: August 10, 2017

In 2015, massive fires burned across Indonesia, releasing hazardous smoke across neighboring countries. How close is the country to meeting its goal of reducing haze from future fires?

August 10, 2017 — Two years ago, Indonesia experienced the largest fire event in modern human history, with more than 2.5 million hectares (6 million acres) of tropical landscape burning, emitting more greenhouse gases than all of Germany does in a year. But the most visible sign of the disaster was the haze that spread across a huge swath of Asia; the particulates in the smoke sullying the air that tens of millions of people breathed. According to one study, the haze resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths. 

It was a watershed moment — and one the world knew could not be repeated as global attention focused on the role forests play in regulating climate during that year’s COP-21 climate conference. Fires in the tropics are dangerous, emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases and releasing toxins, especially when they sit atop carbon-dense peat bogs. But these disasters have become commonplace in Indonesia due to exploitation of peatlands. 

“The root cause of this crisis was forest clearance and peatland drainage at large scale by the plantation sector, which has turned previously valuable ecosystems into huge monoculture plantations, while leaving remaining forests and peatland at high risk of burning,” says Annisa Rahmawati, forests campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia. For years, both palm oil and paper pulp industries built canals to drain peatlands across the country to expand production, which cause them to turn from wet landscapes to dry ones, ready to burn. 

“Fires were a symptom of failed policies,” says Arief Wijaya, senior manager for climate and forests at the World Resources Institute Indonesia. “How the government managed land use was not effective.” 

Historically, agencies at national and local levels distributed land to smallholders and large plantation companies under a patchwork system with no comprehensive national oversight. The result was overlapping and conflicting boundaries, making it impossible to determine who controls burned land. 

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Perspectives: Agroecological Approaches to Enhance Resilience Among Small Farmers

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Author: Clara Inés Nicholls and Miguel Altieri | Published: June 26, 2017

Many studies reveal that small farmers who follow agroecological practices cope with, and even prepare for, climate change. Through managing on-farm biodiversity and soil cover and by enhancing soil organic matter, agroecological farmers minimise crop failure under extreme climatic events.

Global agricultural production is already being affected by changes in rainfall and temperature thus compromising food security. Official statistics predict that small scale farmers in developing countries will be especially vulnerable to climate change because of their geographic exposure, low incomes, reliance on agriculture and limited capacity to seek alternative livelihoods.

Although it is true that extreme climatic events can severely impact small farmers, available data is just a gross approximation at understanding the heterogeneity of small scale agriculture, ignoring the myriad of strategies that thousands of small farmers have used, and still use, to deal with climatic variability.

Observations of agricultural performance after extreme climatic events reveal that resilience to climate disasters is closely linked to the level of on-farm biodiversity. Diversified farms with soils rich in organic matter reduce vulnerability and make farms more resilient in the long-term. Based on this evidence, various experts have suggested that reviving traditional management systems, combined with the use of agroecological principles, represents a robust path to enhancing the resilience of modern agricultural production.

Diverse farming systems

A study conducted in Central American hillsides after Hurricane Mitch showed that farmers using diversification practices (such as cover crops, intercropping and agroforestry) suffered less damage than their conventional monoculture neighbours. A survey of more than 1800 neighbouring ‘sustainable’ and ‘conventional’ farms in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, found that the ‘sustainable’ plots had between 20 to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture and less erosion, and also experienced lower economic losses than their conventional neighbours. Similarly in Chiapas, coffee systems exhibiting high levels of diversity of vegetation suffered less damage from farmers to produce various annual crops simultaneously and minimise risk. Data from 94 experiments on intercropping of sorghum and pigeon pea showed that for a particular ‘disaster’ level quoted, sole pigeon pea crop would fail one year in five, sole sorghum crop would fail one year in eight, but intercropping would fail only one year in 36. Thus intercropping exhibits greater yield stability and less productivity decline during drought than monocultures.

At the El Hatico farm, in Cauca, Colombia, a five story intensive silvo-pastoral system composed of a layer of grasses, Leucaena shrubs, medium-sized trees and a canopy of large trees has, over the past 18 years, increased its stocking rates to 4.3 dairy cows per hectare and its milk production by 130%, as well as completely eliminating the use of chemical fertilizers. 2009 was the driest year in El Hatico’s 40-year record, and the farmers saw a reduction of 25% in pasture biomass, yet the production of fodder remained constant throughout the year, neutralising the negative effects of drought on the whole system. Although the farm had to adjust its stocking rates, the farm’s milk production for 2009 was the highest on record, with a surprising 10% increase compared to the previous four years. Meanwhile, farmers in other parts of the country reported severe animal weight loss and high mortality rates due to starvation and thirst.

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