Tag Archive for: Impact of Agriculture on Climate

Meet the ‘Regenerators’

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Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association and Dr. Vandana Shiva of Navdanya, discuss how the newly formed Regeneration International Communication Network will help to promote the benefits of regenerative organic agriculture and counter the growing global push for industrial agriculture based on GMOs and the increased use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers.

Ronnie Cummins:

The governments and large businesses of world are failing to solve the climate crisis, failing to solve the crisis of poverty, the crisis of environmental degradation, the crisis of values and ethics. If governments and corporations can’t solve the problem, we the people are going to have to solve the problem.

Vandana Shiva:

What we are talking about, is regenerating a new democracy, regenerating new economies, regenerating agriculture which is at the heart of the problem, but can be heart of solution. Everyone eats, most people in world are farmers, so this is an invitation to everyone to join. Everyone loves freedom, rather than being controlled by fraudulent and criminal corporations.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FslSyYMXvE[/embedyt]

Global Alliance on Climate Smart Agriculture: Solution or Mirage?

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Author: Rashmi Mistry

In Paris later this year, global leaders will meet at the Conference of Parties to thrash out a deal to reduce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and to find a solution to the pressing financial needs of billions of people, smallholder women farmers among them, on the frontline in the fight to adapt to climate change.

One of the solutions put forward to address these challenges is the concept of ‘climate smart agriculture’ – but what is it? And should we be worried?

Recognition of the importance of agriculture and climate change is on the rise

Industrial agriculture is one of the major causes of climate change. Around 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions globally derive from the food system, including from methane from livestock production, deforestation to clear land for agriculture and nitrogen from fertilizer use.

Climate change is also creating havoc in many of the world’s farming systems, and endangers the progress made in the last few years to ensure the right to food for millions of people. Slow, insidious changes in global temperatures and shifting weather patterns, as well as increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are disrupting production and distribution systems.

As a result – there is an increasing interest from both companies and policymakers in finding and promoting forms of agricultural production which can reduce emissions, as well as ways in way agriculture can adapt to changing conditions.

Keep Reading in Common Dreams

Ruminants and Methane

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Author: Dr. Christine Jones

Wetlands, rivers, oceans, lakes, plants, decaying vegetation (especially in moist environments such as rain forests) – and a wide variety of creatures great and small – from termites to whales, have been producing methane for millions of years. The rumen, for example, evolved as an efficient way of digesting plant material around 90 million years ago.

Ruminants including buffalo, goats, wild sheep, camels, giraffes, reindeer, caribou, antelopes and bison existed in greater numbers prior to the Industrial Revolution than are present today. There would have been an overwhelming accumulation of methane in the atmosphere had not sources and sinks been able to cancel each other over past millennia.

Although most methane is inactivated by the hydroxyl (OH) free radical in the atmosphere,another source of inactivation is oxidization in biologically active soils. Aerobic soils are net sinks for methane, due to the presence of methanotrophic bacteria, which utilize methane as their sole energy source. Methanotrophs have the opposite function to methanogens, which bind free hydrogen atoms to carbon to reduce acidosis in the rumen. Recent research has found that biologically active soils can oxidize the methane emitted by cattle carried at low stocking rates. The highest methane oxidation rate recorded in soil to date has been 13.7mg/m2/day which, over one hectare, equates to the absorption of the methane produced by approximately one livestock unit (LSU).

In Australia, it has been widely promoted that livestock are a significant contributor to atmospheric methane and that global methane levels are rising. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that methane emissions from ruminant sources are increasing. Indeed, it would seem there has been no clear trend to changes in global methane levels, from any source, over recent decades.

Keep Reading in The Natural Farmer

 

Food and Climate Change: The Forgotten Link

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[ English | Español | Français | Ελληνική ]

Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around half of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Chemical fertilizers, heavy machinery and other petroleum-dependant farm technologies contribute significantly. The impact of the food industry as a whole is even greater: destroying forests and savannahs to produce animal feed and generating climate-damaging waste through excess packaging, processing, refrigeration and the transport of food over long distances, despite leaving millions of people hungry.

A new food system could be a key driver of solutions to climate change. People around the world are involved in struggles to defend or create ways of growing and sharing food that are healthier for their communities and for the planet. If measures are taken to restructure agriculture and the larger food system around food sovereignty, small scale farming, agro-ecology and local markets, we could cut global emissions in half within a few decades. We don’t need carbon markets or techno-fixes. We need the right policies and programmes to dump the current industrial food system and create a sustainable, equitable and truly productive one instead.  

Food and climate: piecing the puzzle together

Most studies put the contribution of agricultural emissions – the emissions produced on the farm – at somewhere between 11 and 15% of all global emissions.[1] What often goes unsaid, however, is that most of these emissions are generated by industrial farming practices that rely on chemical (nitrogen) fertilizers, heavy machinery run on petrol, and highly concentrated industrial livestock operations that pump out methane waste.

The figures for agriculture’s contribution also often do not account for its role in land use changes and deforestation, which are responsible for nearly a fifth of global GHG emissions.[2] Worldwide, agriculture is pushing into savannas, wetlands, cerrados and forests, plowing under huge amounts of land. The expansion of the agricultural frontier is the dominant contributor to deforestation, accounting for between 70-90% of global deforestation.[3] This means that some 15-18% of global GHG emissions are produced by land-use change and deforestation caused by agriculture. And here too, the global food system and its industrial model of agriculture are the chief culprits. The main driver of this deforestation is the expansion of industrial plantations for the production of commodities such as soy, sugarcane, oilpalm, maize and rapeseed.

Keep Reading on GRAIN

World Hunger: Ten Myths

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Authors: Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins

In troubled times, all of us seek ways to make sense of the world. We grasp for organizing beliefs to help us interpret the endlessly confusing rush of world events. Unfortunately, however, the two of us have come to see that the way people think about hunger is the greatest obstacle to ending it. So in this Backgrounder we encapsulate 40 years of learning and in-depth new research to reframe ten such ways of thinking explored in our latest book World Hunger: 10 Myths. We call them “myths” because they often lead us down blind alleys or simply aren’t true.

Myth one: too little food, too many people

Our response: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third. Even after diverting roughly half of the world’s grain and most soy protein to animal feed and non-food uses, the world still produces enough to provide every human being with nearly 2,900 calories a day. Clearly, our global calorie supply is ample.

Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third.

Increasingly, however, calories and nutrition are diverging as the quality of food in most parts of the world is degrading. Using a calorie-deficiency standard, the UN estimates that today roughly one in nine people is hungry—about 800 million; but adding measures of nutrient deficiencies as well, we estimate that a quarter of the world’s people suffer from nutritional deprivation.

Food scarcity is not the problem, but the scarcity of real democracy protecting people’s access to nutritious food is a huge problem. So, fighting hunger means tackling concentrated political and economic power in order to create new equitable rules. Otherwise hunger will continue no matter how much food we grow.

Keep Reading on Food First

Food and Climate: Connecting the Dots, Choosing the Way Forward

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Food & Climate: Connecting the Dots, Choosing the Way Forward, outlines the climate requirements for successful food production, and examines two competing food production methods – industrial and organic – to reveal how they contribute to climate change, how resilient they are in the face of escalating climate shocks, and how organic and related agricultural systems can actually contribute to solving the climate crisis.

In this report, Center for Food Safety examines how industrial agriculture – the dominant method of food production in the U.S. – externalizes many social and environmental costs while relying heavily on fossil fuels. Organic farming, by comparison, requires half as much energy, contributes far fewer greenhouse gasses, and, perhaps most surprisingly, is more resilient in the face of climate disruption.

Food & Climate: Connecting the Dots, Choosing the Way Forward also recommends that government agricultural policies and regulations be designed to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and toxic chemicals and calls on the public to pressure elected officials to act now to slow down climate change. The report rallies individuals to work toward a stable climate and an abundant food supply three times a day by choosing climate-friendly “cool foods.”

Download the Report from the Center for Food Safety

Soil Carbon Sequestration in Conservation Agriculture: A Framework for Valuing Soil Carbon as a Critical Ecosystem Service

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Conservation agricultural systems sequester carbon from the atmosphere into long-lived soil organic matter pools – while promoting a healthy environment and enhancing economically sustainable production conditions for farmers throughout the world. Soil organic carbon is fundamental to the development of soil quality and sustainable food production systems. Soil, soil organic carbon, and soil quality are the foundations of human inhabitation of our Earth. We must enhance the ability of soil to sustain our lives by improving soil organic carbon.

Conservation agricultural systems have been successfully developed for many different regions of the world. These systems, however, have not been widely adopted by farmers for political, social and cultural reasons. Through greater adoption of conservation agricultural systems, there is enormous potential to sequester soil organic carbon, which would:

(1) help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming and

(2) increase soil productivity and avoid further environmental damage from the unsustainable use of inversion tillage systems, which threaten water quality, reduce soil biodiversity, and erode soil around the world.

Download the Report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Wake Up Before It Is Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now for Food Security in a Changing Climate

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Developing and developed countries alike need a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a “green revolution” to a “truly ecological intensification” approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. We need to see a move from a linear to a holistic approach in agricultural management, which recognizes that a farmer is not only a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agro-ecological system that provides quite a number of public goods and services (e.g. water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity, and recreation) UNCTAD’s Trade and Environment Review 2013 (TER13) contends.

TER13 highlights that the required transformation is much more profound than simply tweaking the existing industrial agricultural system. Rather, what is called for is a better understanding of the multi-functionality of agriculture, its pivotal importance for pro-poor rural development and the significant role it can play in dealing with resource scarcities and in mitigating and adapting to climate change. However, the sheer scale at which modified production methods would have to be adopted, the significant governance issues, the power asymmetries’ problems in food input and output markets as well as the current trade rules for agriculture pose considerable challenges.

TER13, entitled Wake up Before it is Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now for Food Security in a Changing Climate was released on 18 September 2013. More than 60 international experts have contributed their views to a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and the most suitable strategic approaches for dealing holistically with the inter-related problems of hunger and poverty, rural livelihoods, social and gender inequity, poor health and nutrition, and climate change and environmental sustainability – one of the most interesting and challenging subjects of present development discourse.

Agricultural development, the report underlines, is at a true crossroads. By way of illustration, food prices in the period 2011 to mid-2013 were almost 80% higher than for the period 2003-2008. Global fertilizer use increased by 8 times in the past 40 years, although global cereal production has scarcely doubled at the same time. The growth rates of agricultural productivity have recently declined from 2% to below 1% per annum. The two global environmental limits that have already been crossed (nitrogen contamination of soils and waters and biodiversity loss) were caused by agriculture. GHG emissions from agriculture are not only the single biggest source of global warming in the South, besides the transport sector, they are also the most dynamic. The scale of foreign land acquisitions (often also termed land grabbing) dwarfs the level of Official Development Assistance, the former being 5-10 times higher in value than the latter in recent years.

Download the Report from UNCTAD

Soil Carbon Restoration: Can Biology do the Job?

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[ 中国 | English | Español | Français | Ελληνική | Italiano | 日本語 |  한국어 | Русский ]

Author: Jack Kittredge

A great deal of discussion in scientific and governmental circles has been focused recently on how to deal with greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting weather extremes they have created. Most analysts believe we must stop burning fossil fuels to prevent further increases in atmospheric carbon, and find ways to remove carbon already in the air if we want to lessen further weather crises and the associated human tragedies, economic disruption and social conflict that they bring.

But where can we put that carbon once it is removed from the air? There is only one practical approach — to put it back where it belongs, in the soil. Fortunately, this is not an expensive process. But it does take large numbers of people agreeing to take part. Since few people will change what they are doing without a good reason, we have written this short paper. We hope it explains the problem of carbon dioxide buildup and climate change, how carbon can be taken out of the atmosphere and restored to the soil, and the advantages that can come to farmers and consumers from growing in carbon-rich soils.

Climate Change

Weather anomalies are notoriously difficult to document. To do so requires good data over a long time, and clear standards for what constitutes an anomaly. Recently, however, as more and more people are interested in the topic, development of the data and standards has progressed. The key factors in extreme weather are excessive heat, precipitation, and air moisture. Recent studies have found that monthly mean temperature records, extreme precipitation events, and average air moisture content have all risen over the last 50 to 150 years. (Coumou)

Download the Report from NOFA/Mass (PDF)

Climate Change, Healthy Soils, and Holistic Grazing… A Restoration Story

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Author: Savory Institute

Summary

Regenerating the health and productivity of our soils is critical for ensuring the Earth’s climate remains conducive to not only human life but other species as well. Moreover, we need to take direct action so that we have enough water and food to sustain a growing population of people. Livestock, properly managed, have a critical role to play in achieving these goals.

Reducing fossil fuel emissions is essential for curtailing the acidification of our oceans and for reversing the rapidly increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But it is just as critical that we greatly reduce the CO2 emissions tied to modern agricultural practices. In addition, there are still many billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere that need to be drawn down to Earth and safely stored if we are to maintain a livable climate for life on Earth.

The most obvious place to store this “legacy load” of CO2 is in our soils, where soil organisms convert it into organic matter, or soil organic carbon. The world’s soils, however, are unable to store the vast amounts of carbon they once did; scientists estimate our soils have lost up to 80 to 537 billion tons of carbon and that land misuse accounts for 30% of the carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.

Efforts to limit emissions from fossil fuel Combustion alone are incapable of stabilizing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Here we will shed light on the process of atmospheric carbon capture and storage that has developed in the natural world over millions of years, has minimal possibility for unintended consequences, and has myriad benefits for the health of lands worldwide as well as all dependent on them.

The quantity of carbon stored in soils is directly related to the diversity and health of soil life. Bacteria, fungi and other soil life convert carbon that plants have extracted from the atmosphere through photosynthesis into organic matter. When soils are healthy, soil life is healthy and more carbon is converted and stored.

Keep Reading on Revitalization News