Authors: Ruby Bird & Yasmina Beddou |Published: Oct 21, 2016
On October 21, 2016 was held an informal Briefing with some journalists to explain and pursue the French Plan toward MARRAKECH (Morocco) for the COP 22 on 7-18 November 2016. It will be the 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties. One of the crucial issues debated was the Launch of the 4 per 1000 initiative by France on Tuesday 1st December 2015 during COP 21. Stéphane Le Foll, French Minister for Agriculture, AgriFood and Forestry; the Australian, German, New Zealand and Uruguayan Ministers for Agriculture; Graziano da Silva, General Secretary of the FAO and M. Mayaki, General Secretary of NEPAD were in attendance.
The 4 per 1000 initiative aims to generate growth in the rate of soil carbon in the form of organic matter of 0.4% per year in the coming decades. This rate of growth would make it possible to compensate for anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. It would concern agricultural soils (growth objective of 1.4 Gt of carbon per year), forests (1.3 Gt per year) and soils affected by salinization or desertification (0.5 to 1.4 Gt per year).
Growth in the organic matter of soils would make it possible to improve the resilience of agriculture and its adaptation to climate change (less sensitivity to erosion, improvement of water retention capacity, etc.), agricultural yield and, in fine, food safety.
Approximately thirty countries signed the initiative, including the majority of European Union countries, Australia, China, Costa Rica, Ethiopa, Indonesia, Mexico, Niger, New Zealand, Turkey and Uruguay. As did ECOWAS, various research centres (including INRA, IRD and CIRAD) and various non-governmental organisations, foundations and agricultural organisations.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/26400525826_22e77612ca_k-1170x780.jpg7801170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-11-02 11:44:132016-11-08 10:18:29Cop 22 – Briefing by Stephane Le Foll French Minister of Agriculture
The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat.
But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.
The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.
Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise.
An analysis by The Times using United Nations data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany. Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that “there was little evidence” that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops.
At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States, even as major crops like corn, soybeans and cotton have been converted to modified varieties. And the United States has fallen behind Europe’s biggest producer, France, in reducing the overall use of pesticides, which includes both herbicides and insecticides.
One measure, contained in data from the United States Geological Survey, shows the stark difference in the use of pesticides. Since genetically modified crops were introduced in the United States two decades ago for crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, the use of toxins that kill insects and fungi has fallen by a third, but the spraying of herbicides, which are used in much higher volumes, has risen by 21 percent.
By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage — 65 percent — and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.
Profound differences over genetic engineering have split Americans and Europeans for decades. Although American protesters as far back as 1987 pulled up prototype potato plants, European anger at the idea of fooling with nature has been far more sustained. In the last few years, the March Against Monsanto has drawn thousands of protesters in cities like Paris and Basel, Switzerland, and opposition to G.M. foods is a foundation of the Green political movement. Still, Europeans eat those foods when they buy imports from the United States and elsewhere.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/GMO-1170x878.jpg8781170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-10-31 12:38:262016-11-08 10:23:14Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops
Author: Marcia Delonge | Published: September 26, 2016
A rigorous study just published in the prestigious journal Science argues that soil alone cannot be can be counted on to save us from climate change. Yet the stark analysis does not undermine the importance of better understanding, protecting, and building carbon in soils (“carbon farming”). In fact, the findings reinforce the need for soil carbon science and action to remain priorities, especially when it comes to agriculture.
The study in a nutshell: Scientists from the University of California used 1-meter (3.28 ft) deep soil samples from 157 places around the world, which were analyzed with sophisticated carbon dating methods to improve the way that soil carbon is represented in some of the best Earth System Models. They found that models may have been overestimating how much carbon would likely be stored in soils under climate change, particularly in response to the so-called “CO2 fertilization effect” (the effect of higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations on fostering plant growth). The findings suggested that the size of the resulting soil carbon “sink” that will be available soon enough to effectively mitigate climate change is lower than previously estimated (by anywhere from 5.9% to 87%). They conclude that models need to represent soil carbon more accurately when simulating climate change scenarios, and emphasized the importance of emissions reduction strategies.
So what does this mean?
If you’re wondering about the implications of the study for soil carbon, climate change, and agriculture, here’s what you need to know:
As my colleagues have written, we are well beyond the stage where we can choose between either reducing emissions or increasing carbon sequestration. We need to act on both, and quickly.
To review the basics, there is a lot of carbon in the atmosphere (as CO2, the main climate change culprit today), but there is far more in soils. If you have been following “carbon farming”, you know that this feature of the carbon cycle is the basis for much enthusiasm. Since plants suck up CO2 and return carbon to the soil, there is constant movement between these two “pools.” Because the soil pool is large, small changes in soil carbon can mean relatively big changes in atmospheric carbon. This is great if soil carbon is increasing, but worrisome otherwise. Either way, understanding soil carbon is one of the keys to the climate change solution.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/14479087843_010dfc6e03_k-1170x780.jpg7801170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-10-29 07:00:232016-11-08 10:24:05Soil Carbon Can’t Fix Climate Change by Itself—but It Needs to Be Part of the Solution
Author: Zoe Loftus-Farren | Published: October 25, 2016
Soil is the unsung-hero of our food system. We depend on it to grow the food we put in our bodies, yet we treat it poorly, compacting it with tractors, depleting it of nutrients, and filling it with chemicals. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that globally, 25 percent of soil is degraded. Team BioNurse, a project of the Ceres Regional Center for Fruit and Vegetable Innovation in Chile, has come up with a creative way to help combat this degradation, one that turns to nature for inspiration.
An interdisciplinary team of seven that includes industrial designers, architects, and agronomists, Team BioNurse has designed a soil restoration mechanism that mimics the Yareta plant, a so-called “nurse” plant found in the harsh environment of the Andes. The resilient Yareta provides shelter for seedlings of other plants, protecting them from the elements and facilitating their establishment in the extreme mountain landscape. In doing so, this hardy plant paves the way for the succession of other, more delicate species.
Team BioNurse designed a “BioPatch” that works the same way. Made of corn stalks and other biological materials, the BioPatch is planted with seedlings of plants that help restore soil health but which would struggle to grow in degraded soils. It nurtures these seedlings, providing them with the necessary nutrients and microbes to thrive under tough conditions, protecting them from wind and UV radiation, and directing water to their roots. The BioPatch is then placed on degraded agricultural fields, which, as BioNurse Team member Camilia Hernández points out, can also be “very harsh environments.” As the seedlings take root, they help amend the underlying soil.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/6347573674_c9ce4e93fb_o-1170x780.jpg7801170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-10-27 14:17:572016-11-08 10:26:22Looking to Nature in the Search for Global Soil Solutions
An interview with Ariel Greenwood, a “feral agrarian” and grazer who manages a herd of cattle while restoring ecosystems.
Describe where you work.
I live and work on a 3,000-acre research preserve in the inter-coastal Mayacamas mountain range region of Sonoma County. Pepperwood has around 1,000 acres of open grassland, another several hundred of mixed oak woodland mosaic, deciduous and evergreen, and some serpentine outcropping, and then some dense dark woodlands. We actually have, I think, the eastern most stand of redwoods in the County. There’s a lot of bay trees and scrubby chaparral too in its own natural state. It’s a really breathtaking and in many ways really challenging landscape.
Pepperwood is a private operating research and ecological preserve. Really, every aspect from the vegetation to the soil to the broader watershed, and then even more largely the climate that we’re situated in is monitored and researched here with staff and other visiting researchers, so it’s very much a progressive conservation-oriented place. This is considered quite a robust eco-tone, the meeting of several different environments.
How does holistic management differ from conventional thinking and methodology?
It’s a broad question, because holistic management is a pretty broad comprehensive platform. But essentially holistic management is a way of managing complexity; it emerged from Allan Savory who is a Zimbabwean biologist and researcher in Africa as a way to attend to some of the problems that were plaguing ranches and grassland preserves in that area. What he found was that while people may profess to have certain values, we often do not manage our projects or ourselves in a way to actually honor those values and those goals.
Here, what that means for our planned grazing is that we regularly compare notes with the preserve about what its goals are in grazing. I graze for a company called Holistic Ag. We are a separate entity from Pepperwood, but we are essentially operating their conservation grazing program. The goal of that program is to steward grasslands, and that looks like many different things, but it’s all predicated on the notion that grasslands need grazing in order to stay healthy. So the grazing here is intended to mitigate the spread of invasive exotic annual grasses and other species. It’s intended to propagate and revitalize native bunchgrasses like Stipa pulchra. It’s intended to improve soil condition and water holding capacity, to mitigate the spread of coyote brush, which in turn mitigates the spread of Douglas fir.
Holistic Ag, of course, has its own goals on top of that. The herd was formed as an ecosystems services company, but because we are doing this with domestic cattle and have to be able to pay for the expense of doing so, we produce and sell beef, which I market under my own brand, Circle A Beef. That means we have to keep our animals healthy. There’s that added layer of complexity, but all of that is intended to be harmonized with the outstanding ecological goal of the place.
So, holistic management allows us to discover those goals, articulate those goals, and then test our decisions against those goals. A really important principle I find very hard to practice, but nonetheless very important in holistic management, is this idea that you’re supposed to assume that you are wrong, so you are actually looking for evidence that you’re right rather than assuming you’re right and, as it often turns out, avoiding evidence that you are wrong.
Because it’s so complex here in California, especially in the Mayacamas, and because we are in not only seasonally dry and wet areas, but pretty significant hills, just moving cattle sensitively across the landscape is another layer of complexity.
Holistic management is just a way to check all of our decisions and make sure they are in keeping with our actual goals. I find that if we didn’t have goals, it would be so easy to drift from our mission. Holistic management puts ecology on the forefront. That is one thing that is kind of non-negotiable with holistic management, whether it is managing a company, a ranch, or a research preserve, or all of those combined. The idea is that if you are managing for the whole, you can’t externalize costs, and the most easily externalized cost is the environmental cost. Social cost is often pretty invisible too.
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.
Author: Natasha Geiling | Published on: October 4, 2016
James Hansen, former NASA director and well-known climate scientist, is out with another dire climate warning: The last time that the Earth was this hot, the oceans were about 20 feet higher than they are right now.
And while that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re in for an unstoppable, 20-foot rise in sea level (although it ostensibly could get that bad), it does mean that the world is leaving a dangerous, and expensive, climate change problem for future generations.
“There’s a misconception that we’ve begun to address the climate problem,” Hansen told reporters on a press call Monday. “The misapprehension is based on the Paris climate summit where all the government leaders clapped each other on the back as if some great progress has been made, but you look at the science and it doesn’t compute. We are not doing what is needed.”
Hansen’s warning is based off a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper — submitted Tuesday to the Earth Systems Dynamics Journal — that he authored with 11 other climate scientists. In the paper, the authors argue that the Earth has warmed by about 1.3°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and that the atmospheric concentration of the most potent greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide — has been accelerating in recent years. The last time the Earth was this hot was during the last inter-glacial period, known as the Eemian, when sea level was about 20 to 30 feet higher than it is today.
State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Solano, chair of the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Resources, Environmental Protection, Energy and Transportation, applauded Gov. Jerry Brown’s approval this week of numerous budget measures on resources, including a number of bills to help the state reach its climate change goals.
The governor signed legislation Wednesday establishing a $7.5 million Healthy Soils Program to support agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon in soil, trees and plants. The bill, which funds the state’s cap-and-trade program, includes the language of Wolk’s Senate Bill 1350 to establish and fund the Healthy Soils Program.
“By providing farmers and ranchers with greater access to programs and other resources, the state will not only help agriculture adapt to climate change but will also help this sector play an important role in addressing climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and storing, or sequestering, carbon in the soil,” Wolk said in a press release. “I applaud the governor’s decision to establish and fund the Healthy Soils program, as well as other important programs such as those to provide clean drinking water to disadvantaged communities and protect our state’s natural resources.”
Senate Bill 859 will establish a Healthy Soils Program to support projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural operations and increase carbon sequestration, or storage, in agricultural soil. Benefits to increased health of agricultural soils include the ability to store more carbon and other greenhouse gases through sequestration, provide more nutrients for plants, retain more water, and reduce erosion — resulting in improved air and water quality, water conservation, enhanced wildlife habitat and healthy rural communities.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Field-1170x781.jpg7811170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-10-04 14:13:382016-10-04 14:13:38Governor Signs Bill to Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change
Author: Greg Reitman | Posted on: January 19, 2015
How to deal with our carbon problem in lieu of climate change was the big question being asked on Monday September 22nd at the Rodale Institute.
We heard from such speakers such as Dr. Vandana Shiva; Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association; Mark Smallwood, the head of the Rodale Institute; Andre Leu of IFOAM; Dr. Richard Teague from Texas A&M University; and Tom Newmark, Co-Founder, The Carbon Underground.
Scientists and world leaders of agrarian reform met to discuss how to reverse climate change by bringing excess atmospheric CO2 back home to the soil, where, as soil carbon, it can improve food production, resilience to climate extremes, and water management. And yes, actually, quickly remove the perilous excesses of CO2 that threatens humanity.
Tom Newmark led the presentation with an analogy: imagine a morbidly obese patient going to a physician. Weighing 400 pounds, the patient struggles daily and fears for the future. The physician makes the obvious diagnosis: you’re severely overweight, he tells the patient. You need to go on a diet! So the doctor then maps out a diet that will keep the patient from gaining any more weight, but will keep him at 400 pounds. The patient is bewildered, but that’s all the physician has to offer. Just don’t gain any more weight.
Author: Jason Hickel | Published on: September 10, 2016
It’s getting hot out there. Every one of the past 14 months has broken the global temperature record. Ice cover in the Arctic sea just hit a new low, at 525,000 square miles less than normal. 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.
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. 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.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/pexels-photo-96865-1-1170x450.jpg4501170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-09-12 08:51:272016-09-19 20:54:25Our Best Shot at Cooling the Planet Might Be Right Under Our Feet
