Tag Archive for: Soil Carbon Sequestration

Regeneration of Soils and Ecosystems: The Opportunity to Prevent Climate Change: Basis for a Necessary Climate and Agricultural Policy

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Author: Íñigo Álvarez de Toledo, MSc

SUMMARY

We are probably at the most crucial crossroad of Humanity’s history. We are changing the Earth’s climate as a result of accelerated human-made Greenhouse Gases Emissions (GHG) and biodiversity loss, provoking other effects that increase the complexity of the problem and will multiply the speed with which we approach climate chaos1, and social too:

We explain and justify scientifically the need to give absolute priority to the regeneration of soils and ecosystems. The sustainability concept has driven positive changes but has failed on two levels: it has been easy to manipulate because of its inherent laxness, and because of the fact that since the Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) indicators show much worsening and certainly no improvement. Global emissions increase and soil erosion is every year hitting new negative records.

Ecological and agrosystem regeneration necessarily implies a change for the better, a positive attitude and the joy of generating benefits for all living beings, human or not. For all, because it is the way to not only reduce emissions to the atmosphere but to allow natural, agricultural and livestock soils to act as Carbon sinks, reducing the threat of an all too sudden increasing Climate Change.Regeneration improves products’ quality, thereby increasing their market value. It improves the properties not just sustaining but carrying them into a future of permanent virtuous processes, in the long and short run. In this way it tackles the increasing intergenerational justice problems. By means of increasing the resilience of the agrosystems, it also substantially contributes to Climate Change adaptation.

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How Cattle Can Fight Climate Change

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Author: Alexander Lykins | Published: January 12, 2017

In Nouakchott, a town on the edge of the Sahara in the North African country of Mauritania, lives a woman named Nancy Abeiderrahmane. In 1989 she founded an organization called Tvivski (PDF) (spring in Arabic) to connects local milk producers in Mauritania with the consumers.

Abeiderrahmane created Tiviski out of frustrations over having to rely on expensive powdered European milk. Today Tiviski provides affordable, locally produced milk to Mauritanians. For the thousands of families who produce milk, the dairy provides a livelihood.

In Richard Toll, a small Senegalese town rich with cattle, a veterinarian by the name of Bagoré Bathily had a similar dream. He founded La Laiterie du Berger, French for “the herder’s dairy.”

Despite Senegal’s having nearly 4 million herders, until 2006 almost all of the milk consumed in the country was imported, powdered milk from Europe. Now La Laiterie du Berger produces over 650,000 liters of milk a year, providing a stable income and food supply to nearly 7,000 people.

In Keffi, Nigeria, a dairy farm with a similar mission of improving development through local agriculture is even more impressive. Nagari Integrated Dairy farm was founded by Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, a former governor, in 1982. In contrast to the previous two farms, Nagari is reported to be one of the largest single integrated dairy farms in Africa, boasting over 37,000 cattle on nearly 3,000 acres. However, Nagari has a similar vision for their organization, in which indigenous ownership, equity and sustainability are key components.

All three dairies have improved food security in their local areas and created economic opportunities for thousands of citizens. All of these dairies cite sustainability within their supply chain as a priority, and all have taken steps to work towards and measure their goals. The good news is agricultural businesses such as these are increasing in sub-Saharan Africa, as locals become invested in combating food insecurity and international funds from companies such as Danone arrive to support these efforts.

These dairies have, however, a less obvious opportunity to take advantage of: the opportunity to help the planet. They have access to tens of thousands of acres of land. All that they need to implement true sustainability is to recognize that the secret to reversing the impact of climate change lies in the soil. A style of grazing, holistic management, uses grazing animals to repair soil health, increase carrying capacity, sequester carbon in the soil, increase its fertility and capacity to retain moisture.

All of these features can hold back deserts and roll back climate change.

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Regenerative Agriculture: Our Best Shot at Cooling the Planet?

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Author: Jason Hickel | Published: January 10, 2017

It’s getting hot out there. For a stretch of 16 months running through August 2016, new global temperature records were set every month.[1] Ice cover in the Arctic sea hit a new low this past summer, at 525,000 square miles less than normal.[2] And apparently we’re not doing much to stop it: according to Professor Kevin Anderson, one of Britain’s leading climate scientists, we’ve already blown our chances of keeping global warming below the “safe” threshold of 1.5 degrees.[3]

If we want to stay below the upper ceiling of 2 degrees, though, we still have a shot. But it’s going to take a monumental effort. Anderson and his colleagues estimate that in order to keep within this threshold, we need to start reducing emissions by a sobering 8-10% per year, from now until we reach “net zero” in 2050.[4] If that doesn’t sound difficult enough, here’s the clincher: efficiency improvements and clean energy technologies will only win us reductions of about 4% per year at most.

How to make up the difference is one of the biggest questions of the 21st century. There are a number of proposals out there. One is to capture the CO2 that pours out of our power stations, liquefy it, and store it in chambers deep under the ground. Another is to seed the oceans with iron to trigger huge algae blooms that will absorb CO2. Others take a different approach, such as putting giant mirrors in space to deflect some of the sun’s rays, or pumping aerosols into the stratosphere to create man-made clouds.

Unfortunately, in all of these cases either the risks are too dangerous, or we don’t have the technology yet.

This leaves us in a bit of a bind. But while engineers are scrambling to come up with grand geo-engineering schemes, they may be overlooking a simpler, less glamorous solution. It has to do with soil.

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Promoting Soil Carbon Sequestration: An Interview With Kiss the Ground

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Published by: Food Tank

Lauren Tucker is the Executive Director at Kiss the Ground, an organization based in Venice, CA. Established in 2013, Kiss the Ground is a nonprofit organization with the mission of “We can do this!” This simple phrase stems from the idea that eaters and farmers have the science and technology to balance the climate and recreate our food system, but everyone needs to feel hopeful and catalyze diverse community solutions. Because of this concept, everything that Kiss the Ground does has an underlying message of a hopeful future.

Food Tank had the opportunity to speak to Lauren about Kiss the Ground’s goals to produce media content, engage homeless youth in their community garden, and advocate for the restoration of soil worldwide. Soil carbon sequestration is kept at the center of everything they do.

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Respected Environmentalist on the Side of the Livestock

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Author: Stephen Cadogan | January 5, 2017 

A respected environmentalist has hit back against the demonisation of beef.

In 2003, Allan Savory won the Banksia award for the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale.

In 2010, the Savory Institute’s sister organisation, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for working to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

Now, the Savory Institute is one of 11 finalists in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge to award scalable and sustainable ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

At the recent World Meat Congress in Uruguay, Allan Savory offered more than 700 meat industry leaders from 36 countries hope for their industry, which has been battered by public opinion.

“With livestock out of feedlots, and back on the land, properly managed,” he said, “we have the opportunity to regenerate deteriorating environments and to impact climate change significantly.”

It’s a welcome piece of encouraging news after so many scientists have targeted ruminant livestock as key contributors to global warming, due to their gaseous emissions.

Savory says agriculture has been a major cause of climate change not because of cattle but because the rise of modern, industrial agriculture destroyed soil life and rendered soils far less capable of storing carbon.

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Local NGOs: Ecosystem Services, Not Orangutans, Key to Saving Leuser

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Author: Colleen Kimmett | Published: January 4, 2017

Five years ago, there were likely very few people outside of Indonesia who’d ever heard of a place called the Leuser ecosystem. Today, this enormous and besieged tropical rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra is on its way to becoming as well known as the Amazon in terms of its unique wildlife and its worldwide conservation significance.

Leuser has received visits from countless international media crews, been the focus of major global NGO campaigns, and, most recently, was the backdrop of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Instagram and Twitter photos.

Orangutans have, arguably, continued to generate much of this attention. Leuser is one of the last refuges of these Critically Endangered primates, found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, and the “last place on earth” — as Leuser has been billed in media campaigns — where they exist alongside tigers, elephants and rhinos.

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Climate Activists Issue Call to Action for Trump Times

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Author: Alastair Bland | Published: January 4, 2016 

If President-elect Donald Trump really is concerned about immigration, perhaps he should be talking about ways to slow global warming.

Rising sea levels, caused by the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps, will probably displace tens of millions of people in the decades ahead, and many may come to North America as refugees.

Climate change, arguably the most pressing issue of our time, will cause a suite of other problems for future generations.

Just over a year ago, world leaders gathered in Paris to discuss strategies for curbing greenhouse gas emissions as scientists around the globe confirmed that humans are facing a crisis.

But that crisis is being ignored or denied by too many Americans and by the many right-wing politicians they elect — including Trump.

He has threatened to reverse any commitments the United States agreed to in Paris.

Trump even selected a well-known skeptic of climate change, Myron Ebell, to head his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

“We are in this bizarre political state in which most of the Republican Party still thinks it has to pretend that climate change is not real,” said Jonathan F.P. Rose, a New York City developer and author of The Well-Tempered City.

Rose said progress cannot be made in drafting effective climate strategies until national leaders agree there’s an issue.

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Berkeley Lab Awarded $4.6m for Transformational Agriculture Technologies

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Author: Julie Chao | Published: January 3, 2017 

As advanced as agriculture has become, there remains a pressing need for nondestructive ways to ”see” into the soil. Now the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded $4.6 million to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) for two innovative projects to address this gap, giving farmers important information to increase crop yields while also promoting the storage of carbon in soil.

One project aims to use electrical current to image the root system, which will accelerate the breeding of crops with roots that are tailored to specific conditions (such as drought). The other project will develop a new imaging technique based on neutron scattering to measure the distribution of carbon and other elements in the soil.

“Both technologies could be transformational for agriculture ⎯ for quantifying belowground plant traits and where carbon and other elements are distributed⎯and will enable the next generation of predictive models for agriculture and climate,” said Eoin Brodie, deputy director of Berkeley Lab’s Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division and a microbiologist who is contributing to both projects. “They’re windows into the soil, something that we urgently need.”

Berkeley Lab received these competitive awards from ARPA-E’s Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration (ROOTS) program, which seeks to develop crops that take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in soil — enabling a 50 percent increase in carbon deposition depth and accumulation while also reducing nitrous oxide emissions by 50 percent and increasing water productivity by 25 percent.

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Regenerative Agriculture Redefined

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Author: Ethan Roland | Published: January 3, 2017

The term Regenerative Agriculture is cropping up all over the place. The annals of the internet are growing almost daily with articles, blog posts, tags, and tweets about farmers, corporations, and foundations shifting their attention toward the new hot thing: Regenerative Agriculture.

It is wonderful to see such a broad-scale conversation happening about agriculture, ecosystem health, and soil carbon. Unfortunately, in all the buzz, some of the definitions of Regenerative Agriculture that have emerged do not live up to its full potential. Many focus solely on soil carbon, ignoring biodiversity, water cycles, and human wellbeing. And while soil fertility and carbon sequestration are hugely important to our planet’s capacity to grow food, they are the tip of the iceberg as far as what Regenerative Agriculture can mean and do for us.

After months of consultation with hundreds of farmers, ranchers, designers, and companies around the world, Terra Genesis International has developed a new and holistic definition of Regenerative Agriculture:

Regenerative Agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves water cycles, and enhances ecosystem services.

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The Changing Face of American Forests

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Author: Nala Rogers | Published: December 29, 2016

Fossil fuel emissions are transforming forests from the bottom up by releasing massive amounts of nitrogen into soil. This may be allowing certain tree species to outcompete others, resulting in a vast shift in the composition of American forests, according to new research presented earlier this month at a scientific meeting in California. These emissions may also be worsening climate change by accelerating carbon dioxide release from the soil.

The changes hinge on the actions of fungi on the forest floor — specifically mycorrhizae, a group of fungi that form relationships with plant roots and help them obtain nutrients. Mycorrhizae are a crucial part of the forest microbiome, and, much like the microbiome of the human gut, they are integral to the health of the whole system.

“Through pollution, we’ve actually manipulated the forest microbiome, which has changed which species are present in the forest at this really grand scale,” said Colin Averill, an ecosystem ecologist at Boston University, who presented the research on December 14 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

The key ingredient in these processes is nitrogen, a central building block of life which all plants need to grow. Bacteria and fungi in the soil decompose dead plants and other organic detritus and break down the nitrogen contained therein, transforming it into an inorganic form trees can readily use.

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