Former and current FAO officials and academics have criticised the document, seen by Climate Home News, for pro-industry bias, cherry-picking data and even “disinformation” about the environmental impacts of animal farming. 

The FAO told Climate Home that a final version of the report – part of an assessment consisting of various documents – would be launched in 2025 and that conclusions should not be drawn from the draft text at this stage. 

Estimates of livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions vary, ranging from 12%-20% of the global total – mostly in the form of methane from ruminants like cows and sheep, and carbon dioxide (CO2) released when forests are cut down for pasture.  

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Methane, which is emitted in cow burps and manure, is a short-lived greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years, making it one of the few available levers to prevent climate tipping points being reached in the near term.   

In a 2024 survey of more than 200 scientists and sustainable agriculture experts, about 78% said livestock numbers should peak globally by 2025 to start bringing down emissions and help keep global warming to internationally agreed limits.   

But the FAO’s draft study offers strong support for growth of the sector, saying livestock’s contributions to food security, nutrition and raw materials for industry make it a “linchpin for human well-being and economic development”.  

It is also described as “critical” for food security, “crucial” for global economies, and “indispensable” for development in sub-Saharan Africa.  

World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions

The report will be submitted to the FAO’s agriculture committee, which has 130 member nations, although the text could change as national representatives thrash out a final version. 

Private-sector lobbyists participating as advisors in national delegations are sometimes also able to influence texts under discussion, according to a July report by the Changing Markets Foundation. 

One FAO insider, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home the draft FAO report had been “biased towards pushing livestock [with] many national interests behind it”.   

The FAO receives around a third of its budget in direct donations from member countries, and the rest in voluntary contributions from the same states and other actors, including businesses and trade associations.   

Tech fixes  

The 491-page draft report, which was overseen by a scientific advisory committee of 23 experts and peer reviewers, does not assess how diets with more plant protein could improve food security.   

One advisory committee member, Professor Frederic Leroy of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told Climate Home a shift to entirely plant-based diets “would severely compromise the potential for food security worldwide because many of the food nutrients which are already limited in global diets are found in livestock. How much you can move (away from livestock) should be the real investigation.” 

This table from a World Bank report (Recipe for a Livable Planet), published in May 2024, shows that vegan diets are the lowest in emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

The report’s analysis assumes rising meat production as demand surges among a growing world population with higher incomes. In this context, it proposes “expanding the (livestock) herd size”, increasing production through intensified systems, better use of genetic techniques, and improved land management.   

“Technological innovations” such as feed additives and supplements to suppress methane are another idea backed by the FAO. Those could include experimental methods such as a vaccine announced last week and funded by a $9-million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund that aims to reduce the number and activity of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach.    

Herdsman Musa takes cattle to graze along the Dodowa-Somenya road in Ghana, April 12, 2024. According to environmentalist Kwame Ansah, ‘The unchecked grazing is not only destroying crops but also eroding soil fertility exacerbating land degradation.’ (Photo: Matrix Images/Christian Thompson/via Reuters)

The report’s findings, once approved, will be fed into a three-part roadmap for bringing agricultural emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  

The first instalment, published at the COP28 climate summit, was viewed internally by some FAO experts as a generic placeholder which largely followed an industry-friendly agenda.    

One ex-FAO official, who requested anonymity, told Climate Home the latest draft report on livestock ploughs a similar furrow and would set expectations for part two of the 1.5C roadmap.   

“The reality is that if they do a (nearly) 500-page report and put 23 experts’ names in front of it, it’s to impress you and say: ‘This is what is going to happen. We’re going to defend the sector’,” the former UN official said.  

Making the case for meat 

The expert added that the study’s panel was skewed toward intensified livestock systems and had “cherry picked” evidence to justify recommendations pointing in that direction.  

Several of the report’s advisory committee members have previously advocated for meat-based diets, and 11 of the study’s contributors work for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), including one of the paper’s committee advisors.

According to the ex-FAO official, ILRI “has been pushing intensified livestock all its life. It’s their identity. It’s what they do.”

The institute co-founded an agribusiness-backed initiative – Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) – which de-emphasised livestock emissions, framing them as just one of several problems for the industry to tackle.

ILRI did not respond to a request for comment.

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Shelby C. McClelland, of New York University’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, told Climate Home she was shocked by a repeated claim in the draft FAO report of “a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the contribution of livestock to global greenhouse gas emissions”.  

“This downplays and outright ignores overwhelming scientific evidence from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], high-profile papers, and other recent studies,” McClelland said. “A statement like this in a supposedly scientific and evidenced-based review by the UN FAO is alarming given their influence on agenda-setting for global climate action.”

Advisory committee member Leroy countered that it was “dangerous” to talk about a scientific consensus when the metrics used to measure methane compared to other greenhouse gases are constantly evolving.  

“This should be part of an open and transparent debate,” he added. “I don’t think we have reached consensus on the way we interpret the effects of livestock agriculture on climate change, the degree of it, how we can measure it and how we can deal with it.” 

Scientists at the FAO first alerted the world to the meat industry’s climate footprint when they attributed 18% of global emissions to livestock farming in the seminal 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow. This analysis found that, far from enhancing food security, “livestock actually detract more from total food supply than they provide.”  

However, the paper sparked a backlash felt by key experts in the agency’s Rome headquarters, as the FAO hierarchy, industry lobbyists and state donors to its biannual $1-billion budget exerted pressure for a change of direction.      

By the time of last December’s COP28, the FAO’s stance had shifted so far that two experts cited in another livestock emissions study called publicly for its retraction. They argued it had distorted their work and underestimated the emissions reduction potential from farming less livestock by a factor of between 6 and 40. 

A deforested and burnt area is seen in an indigenous area used as cattle pasture in Areoes, Mato Grosso state, Brazil, September 4, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Landau)

No ‘carte blanche’ 

Guy Pe’er, a conservation ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, accused the FAO of turning a blind eye to widespread “hyper-intensive grazing practices” and land use change caused by the world’s growing number of mega-farms.

“We’re currently using more land to feed livestock than humans, and that is causing rapid deforestation in Brazil. Ignoring that is outrageous. When an official organisation is producing disinformation like this, I find it extremely irresponsible,” he said.  

Leroy told Climate Home that different types of livestock farming should not be conflated. “If you have over-grazing and the pollution of water sources, that’s clearly wrong, but other types of animal agriculture are also net-positive [for the environment],” he said.  

If the advisory committee “sees advantages in having livestock agriculture as part of the food system, I think there’s a sound scientific basis to assume that,” he added. “It doesn’t mean that it’s carte blanche or ‘anything goes’ at all.” 

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

The post FAO draft report backs growth of livestock industry despite emissions  appeared first on Climate Home News.

As this European Parliament term began, Fridays for Future school strikes, inspired by Greta Thunberg, were sweeping Europe, with young people demanding that political leaders act decisively against climate change’s mortal threat. 

Five years on, as the parliament entered its final chapter, very different protests erupted in Brussels and across Europe – this time led by farmers, who clashed with police and brought the city to gridlock. The farmers’ grievances were many, from rising energy and fertiliser costs, to cheap imports and environmental rules.  

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Just as Fridays for Future signified growing pressure on politicians to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, the farmers’ protests have been seen as a stark warning of the rural backlash against doing so. 

In reality, the reasons for the farmers’ anger are more diffuse.     

Climate and forests centre-stage 

In the early days of the current parliament, the school strikers’ message appeared to be getting through. Tackling climate change was  “this generation’s defining task”, the European Commission declared. Within 100 days of taking office, the new Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met her manifesto promise of launching the European Green Deal. 

The following few years saw climate and forests take centre-stage in EU policymaking to an unprecedented degree: from the Climate Law, which wrote into the statutes the EU’s goal to be climate neutral by 2050, to the Nature Restoration Law (NRL), setting binding targets to bring back nature across Europe, and the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), the first legislation of its kind in the world, which aims to stop EU consumption from devastating forests around the world. 

Then came the backlash. 

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Over the past year, vested industry interests and EU member states have tried to sabotage key pieces of the European Green Deal, including the NRL and the EUDR. 

This pushback against laws to protect the natural world is now a battleground in EU parliamentary elections, with populist, far-right and centre-right parties seeing it as fertile vote-winning territory. 

The centre-right European People’s Party, the largest group in the European Parliament, has been campaigning against key planks of the Green Deal, including the NRL, while promoting itself as the defender of rural interests. 

But the views of the rural constituencies whose votes they covet are not as simplistic or polarised as widely depicted. 

Deep listening 

At Fern, we’ve increasingly worked with people who share the same forest policy goals but are bitterly opposed to one another.

This is why we commissioned the insight firm GlobeScan to run focus groups among rural communities in four highly forested countries: Czechia, France, Germany and Poland. We wanted to find out what those whose concerns have been used to justify the backlash against green laws really think. The results contradict the prevailing narrative. 

All participants – selected with a balance of genders, occupations, political views and socio-economic statuses – felt that forests should be protected by law, and unanimously rejected the idea that such protection measures are a threat to rural economic development or an assault on property rights.

They felt deeply attached to their forests, saw them as public goods, were concerned about the state of them, and had a strong sense of responsibility and ownership towards them. They also wanted to see action to improve industrial forest management practices and mitigate climate change. 

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While there was some sympathy for concerns around too much bureaucracy, even those who expressed this view felt forests should be protected by laws. Moreover, they saw the EU as having a primary role in providing support and incentives, and developing initiatives to fight the climate and biodiversity crises.  

Given how much EU politicians have put rural concerns at the heart of their arguments for rolling back the Green Deal – and are now using them in their election campaigns – it’s telling that their narratives on this do not resonate widely. Even foresters with right-leaning political views saw most of them as extreme and oversimplified. 

The lesson here is that the simplistic, divisive arguments that dominate the public debate over rural people and laws to protect nature do not reflect the complex reality of peoples’ lives or their attitudes. Where a divide exists between those pushing for strong laws to protect nature and the rural communities supposedly resisting them, it’s far from irreconcilable. 

Bridging any such gaps by listening and understanding each other’s perspectives is vital for all our futures. Those elected to the next EU Parliament would be wise to heed this. 

For further information, see: Rural Perspectives on Forest Protection 

The post Right-wing pushback on EU’s green laws misjudges rural views  appeared first on Climate Home News.

When the Stade de France in Paris is filled to capacity, it holds 81,400 people. You would then need another 2,484 to reach the number of badge-wearing participants at last year’s UN COP28 climate change conference in Dubai. This illustrates the sheer size of what was the world’s most important climate-focused event in 2023. 

But it also begs the question, do these annual ‘mega-gatherings’ actually deliver anything? 

One thing is abundantly clear: despite almost three decades of COPs and ballooning attendance, our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and the world continues to warm. 

Process hijacking purpose  

My colleagues and I at Clim-Eat – the think-and-do-tank for food and climate that I founded in 2021 – recently published a paper examining the efficacy of COP summits, specifically in relation to food and agriculture. We found several failures. 

Firstly, negotiations on food and agriculture have moved at a snail’s pace over the past 17 years. In spite of numerous meetings, workshops, submissions and decisions, there has been literally no real-world impact as a result.  

Secondly, the trend of COP host countries – known as Presidencies – launching special initiatives on specific issues of interest has achieved little. These initiatives receive plenty of media attention when announced but amount to little more than virtue signalling. 

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For example, at the launch of COP21’s 4p1000 Initiative, France’s then-Minister of Agriculture said it could reconcile aims of food security and the fight against climate change. Today, the initiative has yet to report anything on the positive climate action it sought to create.  

The same goes for Morocco’s COP22 initiative on Adaptation in African Agriculture. It no longer mentions its ambitious target of raising $30 billion to support farmers – presumably because it hasn’t been reached. There are plenty of other examples of special initiatives being quietly ushered out of the spotlight.  

Unwarranted optimism

Let’s remember that COP negotiations first recognised agriculture as the key to solving climate change in 2006. It then took six years to agree on the next steps. Then, only in 2022, 16 years after the initial point, did the negotiations agree that “socioeconomic and food security dimensions are critical when dealing with climate change in agriculture and food systems.” Sixteen years to build a sentence to combat a third of global emissions.  

This suggests there’s little reason to be optimistic about the Emirates Declaration on Food and Agriculture, a special initiative launched at last year’s COP28. Signed by 159 countries, it called for action to adapt food systems to climate change, but the summit’s official negotiations on food and agriculture failed to acknowledge the declaration or reflect its priorities. The declaration itself is a creative collection of various adjectives and adverbs, reaffirmations and goals to ‘strengthen’ commitments. And six months after its launch, it is not clear whether it has led to anything at all; placing faith in its outcomes is utterly fanciful. 

The path forward

This cycle of the UNFCCC and COP Presidencies applauding special initiatives in the short term without holding countries responsible in the long term has to stop. The hamster wheel of inaction continues to spin.  

But we can slow it down and perhaps get off the wheel altogether. To do this, my colleagues and I concluded that the UN needs to: 

• Reform the UNFCCC process to prioritise measurable results and impacts, shifting its role to that of a watchdog ensuring action from all actors rather than merely organising large, costly meetings. 
• Make COPs leaner and less frequent/hold them every other year, reducing participant numbers and focusing on productive meetings. 
• Increase transparency regarding the financial costs of COPs, participation and emissions, to hold the UN accountable. 

Implementing these recommendations will not be easy. It means changing entrenched ways and tackling entrenched interests. There will be push-back.  

But as the UN’s mid-year climate talks begin in Bonn this week, observe the promises made with little follow-through, the unwarranted yet celebratory atmosphere filling the air – largely destined to be forgotten. Notice that when the clapping has stopped, and the initiators are no longer in the spotlight, they will slink back into the shadows, waiting to resurface onto the next grand stage at COP29 in Azerbaijan.  

The post The great COP food systems illusion: UN climate talks deliver no real-world action appeared first on Climate Home News.

Debt-laden growers want an existing government procurement system to be made legally binding and to raise the minimum price for a wider range of crops – which could help them move away from thirsty rice and wheat farming.

But some agricultural analysts argue that bolstering the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for produce would not resolve the wider climate problems farmers face, nor ease demand for scarce water resources.

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Deedar Singh, a 50-year-old farmer from Patiala, joined a march towards Delhi in mid-February and spoke to Climate Home at a camp on the Punjab-Haryana border, 200 km from Delhi. He participated in a similar mobilisation back in 2020 that lasted for just over a year.

With a family of nine to support, he complained that his five-acre landholding and meagre income of 200,000 rupees per year ($2,400) cannot provide a decent quality of life, especially as weather extremes worsen.

“If untimely rain destroys our rice or hot temperatures shrink the wheat grain, our crops are ruined, leaving us unable to even cover the costs of the next cropping season,” said Singh. Most people in his village rely on financial support sent by their children who have migrated abroad, he added.

Farmers gather at the Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, to burn effigies of political leaders and shout slogans in support of the protest, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Globally, India accounts for 10% of agricultural output and is the second-largest producer of rice and wheat. It is also the biggest consumer of groundwater. Its 260 million farmers depend heavily on depleting water reserves to irrigate their crops.

That means they are also struggling with climate change, as about 65% of the country’s cropped area depends on rainwater. Erratic rainfall and shorter winters are harming yields, with heavy downpours causing flooding and a sudden spike in temperatures a year ago causing wheat grain to shrink.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) reports that for every 1C increase in temperature, wheat production suffers a significant decline of 4-5 million tonnes.

Debt drives suicides

Water resources are running low and farmers’ input costs have soared – yet the government-administered minimum support price (MSP) has not risen accordingly, said Ramandeep Singh Mann, an agriculturist and member of Kisan Mazdoor Morcha, an umbrella body spearheading the current protest.

That has left farmers with no money to pay for contingencies and has forced many to take on high levels of debt, he said.

“At some point your back breaks. When that happens, there is no other solution but to take extreme steps,” he added, referring to suicides among indebted farmers.

To boost falling yields, farmers are using more inputs like water and fertilisers, leaving them with higher production costs and lower profit margins.

Some states have provided free or subsidised electricity, as well as loan forgiveness for debt-strapped farmers, but since 2014, only half of the intended waiver recipients have benefited, according to a study by the State Bank of India.

These woes have fuelled a growing wave of protest, as farmers feel they have no other recourse.

Nonetheless, Sardara Singh Johl, a 97-year-old agricultural economist from Ludhiana and former vice-chancellor at Punjab Agricultural University, said the latest mobilisation was unlikely to result in the dialogue required to address the broader problems facing farmers.

“They already have MSP for wheat and rice, and these are high-paying crops. Even if you reduce the price risk with MSP, what can you do about the other uncertainties?” he asked.

In mid-February, at the last round of talks with the government, ministers proposed to purchase five additional crops – moong dal, urad dal, tur dal, maize and cotton – from farmers at an MSP for five years through central agencies, but farmers rejected the offer.

Jagjit Singh Dallewal, leader of the non-political Samyukta Kisan Morcha group, which is also involved in organising the farmers’ protest, said the proposal would mainly benefit farmers willing to switch from paddy or wheat to other crops and would not ensure a stable income.

Farmer leaders give a press conference at Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, on February 27 2024. Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Water reserves shrink amid over-use

Economist Johl argued that, irrespective of its profitability, rice is no longer a suitable crop for Punjab as its water table recedes to a dangerously low level.

A study by Punjab Agricultural University found that between 1998 and 2018, groundwater levels in the region had dropped drastically, from 10 metres below ground to 30 metres, largely due to a shift from traditional canal irrigation to widespread adoption of tube wells for water extraction.

Farmers are aware of Punjab’s dwindling water resources, said Mann, but they need guaranteed price support for more crops in order to shift away from water-intensive rice cultivation.

“They know that if they are able to earn as much as they do from paddy, they will grow other crops. But without fair support of MSP, it is hard to make that switch,” he said.

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Uday Chandra, a professor of government at the Georgetown University in Qatar, said key food-supplying states like Punjab have struggled to get their problems heard and dealt with by the national government.

“The problem is that what the Punjab farmer wants isn’t sustainable,” he said, referring to the state’s shrinking water supplies. “The best way would be to bring them into discussion and find a solution that is specific to them.”

Trucks lined up at the Shambhu border, 200 km from Delhi, after being stopped by the central government from advancing to the Indian capital, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Thousands of farmers who were initially stopped by heavy police control outside Delhi have now made it to the capital after receiving permission to protest at the Ramlila Maidan ground. They are determined to maintain their mobilisation during the general elections – which will take place over several weeks from late April until the start of June – if their MSP demands go unmet.

In 2021, angry farmers backed down after the government rowed back on laws that had sparked huge protests. But they have now returned to direct action, calling on the government to fulfill its promises, including demands for pensions, debt waivers, penalties for selling counterfeit agricultural inputs, and withdrawal from the World Trade Organization.

Call for high-tech solutions

Mann said climate change is compounding their woes – yet while the government acknowledges the problem, it is doing little to help the sector deal with it.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

However, at the ICAR’s Annual General Meeting last month, Arjun Munda, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, said the Modi government is committed to bolstering the agricultural sector and supporting farmers, including with high-yielding, resilient seed varieties released by ICAR in the past decade.

It also issues Agromet weather-based crop advisories with the India Meteorological Department to about 60 million farmers twice a week and promotes practices for more efficient use of water and nutrients.

But protesting farmers said the government’s measures are failing to help them adapt adequately to a changing climate and water shortages.

Bhupinder Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Mohali district, discusses his transition to organic farming methods as a means to prevent the burning of stubble remaining after rice cultivation, November 26 2023. (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Haranjeet Singh, 53, of Ludhiana in Punjab, said the rice variety farmers are now planting gives smaller harvests, after the government suspended use of a more productive but thirstier variety which also took longer to mature and produced more stubble – a major cause of air pollution when burned.

“Unfortunately, these new seeds don’t give us as much yield,” he said. “We are spending the same amount of money and getting less in return.”

Madhura Swaminathan, daughter of the late MS Swaminathan – the architect of India’s Green Revolution which boosted crop yields and tackled the nation’s food scarcity issues in the 1970s – believes greater use of technology could help.

The professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore pointed to an example she encountered in Amritsar a few years ago, where groundwater sensors were connected to mobile apps, enabling users to remotely control water pumps and conserve water.

“We must embrace new technologies, farming practices, and techniques to tackle the challenges brought by climate change,” she said.

The post What will it take to protect India’s angry farmers from climate threats? appeared first on Climate Home News.

As global policymakers, nonprofit advocates and industry leaders meet this week in Geneva to turn lofty promises to slash methane emissions into meaningful action, a crucial stakeholder will largely be missing from the table: the private sector.

The aim of the 2024 Global Methane Forum is to build on the Cop26 climate summit, where more than 150 countries pledged to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030, as well as other methane commitments made at last year’s Cop28.

But ratcheting up private sector action remains a looming agenda item. Because for all those promises, we aren’t seeing the companies in the sectors that contribute most to humanity’s methane emissions – agriculture and energy – take the ambitious steps needed to fulfill them.

In fact, new findings show the energy industry’s methane emissions didn’t budge last year from a near all-time high. Nor have we seen enough investors step up to drive this needed action in the companies they hold.

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Food companies’ agricultural activities, especially raising livestock, and fossil fuel operations, largely from oil and gas companies, are responsible for nearly equal parts of 75% of human-caused methane emissions worldwide.

Food and energy corporations must confront the escalating material financial risks they face from climate change. Lowering methane emissions is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to slow the overheating of our planet in the short term.

There are three key actions companies across both sectors can take to mitigate their main sources of methane pollutants – and in doing so, accelerate the transition to more sustainable and resilient systems for feeding and powering our world.

Disclose plans for reducing emissions

Before they can tackle them, companies need to understand what their methane emissions are, where they come from, and how they can reduce them. These details should be disclosed in their transition plans so that external stakeholders, including investors who use the information to evaluate climate risk in their portfolios, can hold companies accountable for voluntary methane commitments.

More major food companies benchmarked by Ceres in our investor-led Food Emissions 50 initiative are reporting the drivers of their supply chain emissions, but only a few, such as Yum! Brands and Starbucks, have disclosed how they address livestock emissions. Since most of the sector’s methane emissions – and around 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions – stem from livestock, it’s critical that companies include this in their plans.

Oil and gas companies, for their part, should join sector-wide efforts like the United Nations Environment Programme’s Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, which seeks to improve accuracy and transparency of methane data and track corporate progress. Over 130 businesses globally are participating in this partnership and have committed to report their measurement-based emissions, set a methane reduction target, and submit an implementation plan.

Leverage technology

In both sectors, companies must embrace existing and emerging technologies for the global community to successfully reach its methane reduction goals.

Food companies won’t be able to meet their emissions targets using current agricultural technologies and practices, but livestock emissions could be cut substantially through sustainable changes to farming practices. Companies will have to invest in, and incentivise farmers to adopt, new technologies that are already gaining traction, such as seaweed feed additives for cattle, and other proven and ready-to-deploy methods for curtailing agricultural methane.

To achieve net zero by 2050, methane emissions from fossil fuel operations need to fall by around 75% between 2022 and 2030. That may seem like an enormous task, but oil and gas companies can avoid more than 75% of current emissions using known technology, including replacing methane-emitting equipment with zero-emitting alternatives, with close to 50% of emissions avoidable at no net cost.

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Advocate for new policies

Government policies can create new opportunities and mandates that support sector-wide methane action – and companies need to advocate for them. Ahead of Cop27, 800-plus investors representing nearly $42 trillion assets under management signalled just how essential policies are to reaching a net zero economy when they called on governments to radically increase their climate ambition.

Recently, we have seen new policies open important pathways for funding and advancing lower-emissions agricultural solutions, such as when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration streamlined the process for methane-inhibiting feed additives to gain regulatory approval last month. Before and at Cop28, the European Union adopted more stringent regulations, and Canada proposed robust regulations to significantly reduce oil and gas methane emissions.

With the international climate community’s eyes on methane this week, and 2030 rapidly approaching, it’s time to focus on igniting action where the opportunity – and responsibility – for cutting emissions is the greatest. If food and fossil-fuel companies do not clean up their operations, they will not be able to uphold their climate commitments, nor will we meet our global methane goals.

The post Companies still missing in action on methane-cutting goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

The journey is equal parts dramatic and harrowing—with canyon-like views of the Atlas Mountains via treacherous switchbacks, and a vast landscape of desert beyond Ouarzazate.

Along the way—some 330 kilometers from Marrakech—the commune of Imider sits nestled on Morocco’s National Route 10 (N10). Hardly registering to passing tourists, Imider is one of the poorest and most-water stressed communities in Morocco. The climate is semi-arid—it rains only a few times a year—and poverty levels are nearly triple the national average.

Indigenous adaptation

Despite general disregard from passersby and neglect from Morocco’s central government in the northwest, Imider’s residents are proud members of the indigenous Amazigh Ait-Atta tribal confederation (otherwise known as “Berber” to western audiences).

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For centuries, Amazigh communities have populated much of the country’s southeast, adapting to the harsh and semi-arid climate that comes with being east of the mountains and isolated from the seaside. Despite the unforgiving landscape, these groups are agropastoral—herding sheep and goats and farming a variety of crops like olives, almonds dates, and vegetables. In Imider, most people live on less than a dollar a day.

In a region where annual precipitation can range from a few inches to less than an inch, water is life—or “aman iman,” as residents say.

Drought-affected fields in the Tinghir province. Photo: Rachel Santarsiero

To adapt to such low rainfall levels, Amazigh groups have long depended on a traditional system of water storage and distribution, known as ‘khettara’. This system relies on a series of underground canals to source water for farming fields and is incredibly efficient in arid and semi-arid climates. To the Amazigh, the khettara is sacred.

But as higher temperatures and drought conditions become the norm in Morocco, and as privatized companies continue to mine the south and southeast for phosphate and silver—as has been done in Imider—the centuries-old irrigation system is under threat.

The khettara irrigation

Among those affected is Mohammed Boumnir, a farmer in Imider who maintains his family’s plot of land, and harvests olives, dates, figs, grass, buckthorn, pomegranates, and radishes. The hand-dug canals of the khettara separate each set of crops like a lattice, but today they are bone dry. “This drought, the mining, it’s all affecting the farm. It’s cut off more than 80% of our water”, he told me.

In place of the dried-out khettara system, Boumnir has had to install irrigation pipes to help source water. Other farmers on adjacent plots have installed solar panels and mechanized wells to pump water from deeper beneath the ground. Those are costly endeavors that not all farmers in the area can afford.

Even with these advancements, the results of these new technologies are mixed. “The figs, almonds, olives—they’re all getting smaller, and they taste different than they used to”, Boumnir said.

With the onslaught of climate change, the Kingdom of Morocco has sought to position itself as a leader in the green technology economy—both within Africa and on the world stage with its western partners.

Mining dependence

Despite its sustainable agenda, phosphate and silver mining contributes to over 10% of the country’s GDP – just behind agriculture and tourism. But Morocco’s dependence on mining gets overshadowed by its flashy renewable energy projects, most notably the Noor Solar Power Station in Ouarzazate.

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Extractive capitalist projects in the southeast, like the Noor Solar Plant, or the deleterious silver mining in Imider, only exacerbate the harsh conditions that vulnerable Amazigh communities are struggling with. And while the Kingdom of Morocco continues to uphold its “green” façade to the international community, Amazigh locals in the southeast—battling land grabs, groundwater depletion, and resource extraction—are being left behind.

Hope for the future is hard to come by in Imider. Many locals are unemployed, and others are moving away. But there is one phrase that’s continually shared amongst residents, in native Tamazight: “You can pluck all the flowers, but you can’t stop the march of spring.”

Rachel Santarsiero is a climate researcher at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The post Morocco’s centuries-old irrigation system under threat from climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

Animal agriculture contributes up to a fifth of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including a third of the world’s methane emissions. Because methane has over 80 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 20-year timeframe, swift and absolute reductions from the livestock sector are vital to keeping the Paris Agreement climate targets within reach.

According to leading researchers, even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately halted, livestock emissions could make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult to limit it to “well below” 2°C.

MDBs livestock investments

Despite this, since 2010, the World Bank and other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have invested over $4.6 billion of public money to help expand large-scale livestock production, exacerbating the climate crisis while also driving deforestation, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution.

Tomorrow world leaders will meet in Paris for the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact, organized by French President Emmanuel Macron and Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

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The summit will address key issues, including reform of multilateral development banks, with the goal of “addressing climate change and the global crisis.” Central to such reform should be a commitment by MDBs to end their support for GHG-intensive and highly environmentally destructive industrial livestock operations.

On his first day as World Bank President, Ajay Banga made climate change a clear priority by directing his staff to “double down” on their climate efforts. But words aren’t enough. The World Bank and other MDBs must take concrete steps to preserve the best possibility of limiting global warming to “well below” 2°C. In agriculture, this translates into shrinking, not expanding, the global industrial livestock sector.

Fatal flaws

MDBs are fueling the global expansion of factory farming while failing to account for the sector’s impacts on climate.

In a new report we co-authored on behalf of the Stop Financing Factory Farming Campaign (S3F), we argue that flaws in MDBs’ frameworks for aligning their investments with the Paris Agreement are resulting in the misclassification of industrial livestock investments as compatible with the Agreement’s mitigation and adaptation goals.

A key flaw is that the frameworks are based on countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)–the climate plans they submit to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But the UN’s climate body itself actually finds that NDCs are “not on track to meet climate goals.”

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Equally important, only 40% of countries incorporate livestock into their NDCs, and none have set methane reduction targets from the sector. MDBs’ Paris Alignment frameworks also fail to account for the extreme vulnerability of intensive, highly centralized livestock operations to climate-related heat stress, disease spread, and water shortages.

None of the world’s leading MDBs currently require that industrial livestock sector borrowers provide comprehensive (Scope 1-3) emissions reporting or commit to absolute, time-bound GHG reduction targets.

IFC’s poor record

Even more concerning, a comprehensive analysis by Bank Climate Advisors reveals that the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has systematically failed to apply its own GHG-related environmental standards which are already insufficient to the task of reducing absolute emissions from industrial livestock production.

Only last month, IFC approved a $32 million loan to Brazilian dairy giant Alvoar Lacteos and a $47 million loan to GXYX, a massive pig farm operation in China, despite civil society concerns and opposition to each. Neither company has committed to comprehensive GHG reporting or reductions or time-bound zero-deforestation targets, and neither has addressed other negative l impacts of value-chain activities, including biodiversity loss from feed production and grazing.

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Often, MDBs use arguments about food security and the need to keep food prices low to justify investments in resource-intensive factory farming operations.

In reality, however, a shift away from industrial livestock production toward agroecological systems could more efficiently and equitably feed the planet. These systems prioritize smaller-scale farmers and communities, help facilitate a shift toward sustainable, plant-forward diets, conserve natural resources, and yield significant climate and biodiversity-related benefits.

To honor their commitments to Paris Alignment, MDBs should shift their agricultural investments toward climate-friendly agroecological farming systems that support food sovereignty and food security, and end their investments in intensive, polluting and high-emitting industrial livestock operations. Shifting investments in this way would deliver economic, public health, food security, and climate dividends now and for future generations.

Kelly McNamara is a senior research and policy analyst and Kari Hamerschlag is deputy director of food and agriculture at Friends of the Earth U.S.

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The International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) board was initially due to vote at its 30 April meeting on a BRL160 million ($32 million) loan to Alvoar Lacteos intended to help the company expand its operations in Brazil and support wider food security.

Alvoar Lacteos owns and manages industrial facilities in the Midwest and Northeast regions of Brazil, making products such as UHT milk, powdered milk, yogurt, cheese and sweets. The money would be used to install new equipment, renovate existing industrial units and build a new unit for cheese production, as well as for improving the company’s environmental and social standards.

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A group of 16 Brazilian and international organisations, including Friends of the Earth, the Global Forest Coalition, the International Accountability Project and the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, wrote to the IFC in April urging it to reject the loan, arguing it had not properly accounted for the project’s environmental and social impacts.

The decision has since been rescheduled to the end of May. Emails sent by IFC and seen by Climate Home News imply is so the IFC board can consider evidence presented by the group, although an IFC spokesperson told Climate Home “the timing of when projects are taken to the board is dependent on numerous factors”.

Neither the IFC nor Alvoar Lacteos responded to questions about the concerns raised or the delay.

Suppliers emissions ignored

Civil society groups raised numerous concerns about the loan, including a claim that it is incompatible with the IFC’s commitment to align investments with a 1.5C global warming threshold.

The only current climate-related requirement in the project’s environmental and social action plan is for Alvoar Lacteos to prepare its first greenhouse gas inventory and estimate the emissions under its direct control (scope 1 and 2) “following an internationally recognized methodology, and local regulations”.  It has until April 2024 to do this.

There is no requirement for the company to monitor scope 3 emissions from its suppliers, like the chopping down of forests to graze cattle, which comprise the vast majority of a dairy company’s climate impact. The civil society organisations argue these emissions should be “the focus of reduction and mitigation measures”.

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Kelly Anne McNamara is a senior research and policy analyst in the international climate and agriculture finance programme of Friends of the Earth, one of the organisations that has challenged the loan. 

She told Climate Home the IFC had clarified that it was working with Alvoar on addressing its scope 3 emissions by avoiding deforestation on dairy farms and farms associated with sourcing feed. But she pointed out that no actual mitigation or reduction is required under the terms of the loan.

Paris alignment

Two years ago, the World Bank pledged to align all its financing with the goals of the Paris Agreement and it says it is on track to do this for all its new operations from July 2023. The IFC has a weaker target of aligning 85% of new operations by that date and 100% from July 2025.

However, a new climate framework for multilateral development banks is under development which the IFC will be using to assess its investments. It says that”non-ruminant livestock” are consistent with the Paris agreement’s goal but it does not mention ruminant livestock like cows and sheep.

G7 calls on all countries to reach net zero by 2050

Campaigners said the framework suggests that such projects will require evaluations against specific greenhouse gas reduction criteria but have seen no evidence that the IFC has assessed the Alvoar project in this way.

“Had IFC done so, it might understand that there is a need for a major reduction in production in the cattle sector in the [Latin America and the Caribbean] region, along with a heightened focus on measures to significantly cut the [greenhouse gas] footprint of existing operations through better management practices,” they wrote in their letter.

This, they said, could include a shift away from intensive feed and milk production, toward silvopasture and agroforestry practices that increase sequestration and do not rely on fossil fuel-based fertilisers and pesticides.

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International development banks, including the IFC, have spent billions supporting the meat and dairy industries over the past decade. Although the IFC stopped supporting new coal projects in April, it has made no explicit restrictions on other activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions.

The civil society groups also pointed out that Alvoar has not set itself a net zero target, and said this should be a requirement for the project.

And they criticised the IFC for not doing enough to understand other potential environmental and social issues linked to dairy supply chains, such as child and forced labour, land rights and deforestation.

Alvoar does not own any cattle farms so its milk is sourced from 5,500 farmers, including dairy cooperatives and individual farmers, as well as middlemen. Campaigners say it has no supply chain management system in place to address these.

No hard requirement

Although the IFC expects Alvoar to develop such a system if the loan is approved, campaigners note that there is no hard requirement to achieve full supply chain traceability or zero deforestation by a specific date.

Campaigners argue the IFC was wrong to conclude that any risks from the project would be short-term and localised and said it should have required a more comprehensive environmental and social assessment and mitigation plan.

Although the loan is in part intended to help Alvoar boost its environmental and social standards, critics said the onus was on the IFC to understand those risks in advance.

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Campaigners also question whether the loan will actually help increase food access for the neediest Brazilians.

IFC loans are normally approved without controversy. But last year a decision on whether to approve another agricultural project – soy and corn feed sourcing by the Brazilian arm of a major European meat producer – was also delayed after campaigners expressed doubts about its impact on deforestation.

McNamara said that, although the earlier loan was eventually approved, some IFC board directors abstained and several encouraged campaigners to keep raising concerns. In the case of the Alvoar project, however, she thinks food security arguments are likely to over-ride other considerations.

The IFC board is made up of 25 representatives of different governments.

This article was updated on 26 May 2023 to include IFC’s statement

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15-year-old Meera Gaikwad*, who is six months pregnant, knows her life will change forever when she moves 100km to cut sugarcane in Karnataka this season. There is no work at her drought-prone home of Paargaon, a small village in western India’s Maharashtra state.

Gaikwad told Climate Home News that she is afraid she will have to deliver her baby in a hut next to the fields, without access to medical care.

Thousands of girls like Gaikwad migrate from their villages every year to join in the sugarcane harvest from October until April. In total, more than 1.5 million workers leave their homes for the sugarcane fields.

Climate impacts, in particular heatwaves, droughts and floods, are worsening their plight. Women, some of whom are pregnant, cut and package sugarcane in temperatures of up to 46C.

In August and September, Climate Home travelled to the states of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, where most of India’s sugarcane is grown and manufactured. Reporters found women and girls working in in dangerous conditions for up to 18 hours a day, without access to health or sanitation facilities.

Climate Home spoke to dozens of women who have had their wombs surgically removed, in the misguided belief it would help them to cope with the intensive workload.

Thousands of young girls and women migrate from Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district each year to harvest sugarcane

Double shift

Climate change is aggravating an already dire situation for women in Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district, where farming grinds to a halt for almost eight months due to a lack of rainfall. The region suffered from droughts in four separate years between 2010-2019, according to a government report.

Sugarcane cutting is physically demanding. Women work the fields in all weathers, they told Climate Home – and are also expected to do the heavy lifting at home.

Typically, they wake up at around 3am, two hours before the men, to fetch water and carry out domestic work before heading to the fields at 6-7am. After returning home in the evening or late at night, the women cook dinner for the family and finish off other tasks, such as cleaning and washing clothes.

“The men get some rest, but the women don’t,” said Arundhati Patil, executive member of Marathwada Navnirman Lokayat, an organisation working on socio-economic issues in Beed.

A 2020 study by researchers of Pune-based Symbiosis International University concluded that the working and living conditions of these women “violate basic human rights”. They have to bend for hours, pick up very heavy cane bundles and mount them at risky heights, sometimes in complete darkness at night.

Inadequate healthcare

Many women, like Gaikwad, carry out this backbreaking work while pregnant. They work in all weathers right up until their delivery.

20-year-old Anisha Sharad Bhavale, from Koyal village in Maharashtra, gave birth in a hut near a sugarcane field in 2020. Her baby boy died two weeks later. The nearest hospital was 30km away.

She had borrowed 70,000 rupees ($840) from a labour contractor for her son’s medical care. A week after the birth, she was back at work to start paying it off.

A teenage girl sits on a suitcase in her family’s hut near the sugar fields in Beed, Maharashtra

The unsafe working conditions in the sugar fields also sometimes result in miscarriages. One of Bhavale’s relatives was six weeks pregnant when she tripped and fell into a hole, which led to a miscarriage. Her husband, Sharad Bhavale, said there was no vehicle available to take her to the hospital or a nearby healthcare facility where she could have treatment.

The lack of healthcare and sanitation facilities is a major concern, Patil said. “There is no provision of medicines or doctors that can address their issues.”

A 2020 report by Oxfam India said “public health facilities at the villages are inadequate to address [women’s] ailments”, making medical treatments “impossible”, and prolonging any illnesses they suffer from.

Constant harassment

Gaikwad was married two years ago, when she was just 13. She became pregnant earlier this year. “Until we have a baby, we are considered young and poachable, even after we are married. That is why, we try to become mothers as soon as we are married — to avoid any disgrace to our family,” she said.

Thousands of girls are forced to marry by their parents soon after they start having their period – between 12-15 years of age. According to social activists, parents insist on this to ensure their daughters’ safety and because couples are hired more easily and earn more money in the sugarcane fields.

Thousands of young Indian girls like Meera Gaikwad* migrate from their villages every year, to work as labourers harvesting sugarcane

During their early teenage years, many girls also start working in the fields, said Mahadev Chunche, associate professor at the Kumbhalkar College of Social Work in Wardha, Maharashtra. This is partly to avoid them staying behind at labour tent camps, where parents fear they will be abused and harassed by men, he said.

“If a girl is good at cutting sugarcane, she starts getting a lot of marriage proposals. Single men are on the lookout for life partners as couples get a better advance for working in the fields,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Marriage [eligibility] is mostly dependent on a girl’s skill in the field rather than her education or how she looks.”

A married couple receives a higher amount as an advance for cutting sugarcane – in the range of 150,000 to 300,000 rupees ($1,800-3,600), whereas a single woman is paid 50,000 to 150,00 rupees ($600-$1,800).

Abuse goes unreported

Sexual harassment and abuse are rife in the sugar fields, the investigation revealed. More than a dozen women and girls told Climate Home, on the condition of anonymity, that they had suffered or witnessed abuse.

“When I stay back in the tent and my parents go to the sugarcane fields, sometimes men come to the hut and say bad things… and harass us. They come when they see I’m alone at home… I feel scared,” a 20-year-old widow, who has one child, told Climate Home.

According to a study by Symbiosis International University in Pune, India, “physical abuse and rapes [by male contractors at the worksite] happen quite often though they are not formally reported”.

Chunche spoke to more than 400 women in Maharashtra for his PhD on India’s sugar labourers, seen by Climate Home News. He said that almost 80% of them told him they faced sexual harassment, were molested or raped by male sugar labourers, drivers and middlemen.

“Usually no one says anything or files a complaint,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Sometimes the pressure is from the labour contractors not to speak but the main reason is their poverty. They fear that if they report [the abuse], it will bring disrepute, they will get no more work and there will be no one to marry them.”

Whenever such an incident happens, parents view it as a disgrace to the family and choose to marry their daughter off at a very young age, said Gaikwad.

In many cases, teenage girls don’t complain about sexual harassment as they are scared that they will lose their chance of going to school and be forced to sit at home, she said.

The working and living conditions of women working in India’s sugar fields “violate basic human rights,” researchers say.

Choosing hysterectomy

Women working in the sugar industry endure daily pain, as they lift 20-40 kg sugarcane bundles on their heads, including while pregnant or suffering from menstrual cramps.

“When women work long (15-18) hours or they squat in agriculture fields or when they lift heavy weights, they can develop abdominal pain,” said Himani Negi, a Delhi-based gynaecologist who runs a women’s care clinic.

To escape this constant pain, many women choose to have their womb removed. The practice has been prevalent among sugar workers for years. Women in Maharashtra’s Beed district were twice as likely as the state average to have had a hysterectomy, according to analysis of official data by Climate Home News.

In many villages in Ambajogai, a division of Beed district, at least 50-60 hysterectomy cases have been recorded over the past two decades, according to Patil.

Ishmala Raghu Patwade, who is in her mid-40s and has several children, told Climate Home News that she had a hysterectomy three months ago.

“My stomach was hurting. I was going through a lot of pain. My uterus had developed knots because of working in the fields. It had to be removed,” she said. Other women recommended the surgery to relieve her pain.

But the operation didn’t help her. Since having it, she can no longer work or lift any heavy items. As a result, the sole earner of the family now has to sit at home. Her husband Raghu used to also work in the sugarcane fields but stopped five years ago after he got severely injured working in the field.

Misinformation and complications

In 2019, a report by the Maharashtra government found that over 13,800 women (about 16% of the 82,300 surveyed) involved in harvesting sugarcane from the Beed districts had their womb removed in the last 10 years. Most of these women were in the 35-40 age group.

According to a report by the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management, one of the main reasons women choose to have surgery is to avoid losing wages when pain prevents them from working.

Dr Nitin Chate, associate professor at the Swami Ramanand Tirth Rural Government Medical College in Beed, who comes from a family of sugarcane labourers, blamed misinformation.

“Poverty and illiteracy are two devils,” said Chate. “Due to poor awareness, women choose hysterectomies. After this surgery, many women face a disease called osteoporosis, which is related to weak bones.”

Ishmala Raghu Patwade chose to have a hysterectomy after other women told her it would relieve her abdominal pain

Other common complications include vaginal prolapse, back pain, poor balance and urinary incontinence. “Women should be made aware that this surgery won’t address their pain,” said gynaecologist Negi.

Gaikwad told Climate Home it was her dream to go to university, but she has accepted her reality. “We cut sugarcane, no matter what. Whether there’s sweltering heat, frigid cold, or even if the sugarcane fields are flooded with rain, we have to work in the field to cut the sugarcane. There’s no other option,” she said.

“Do girls like me not deserve any justice?”

*Meera Gaikwad is not the subject’s real name, to protect her identity as a minor.

Reporting by Meenal Upreti, Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post India’s female cane cutters face child marriage and hysterectomy appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sofanit is a gender specialist working as the regional gender and social inclusion coordinator at Ripple Effect, formerly known as ‘Send A Cow’.

Ripple Effect works with smallholder farmers to equip them with knowledge and skills enabling them to improve their livelihoods and thrive.

Farmers working alongside Ripple Effect learn more, grow more and sell more. They can feed their families nutritious food, and by having a surplus to sell can invest in their farms, send their children to school and build sustainable agri-businesses.

In this episode, Sofanit takes us through her journey working with women farmers in different African countries to deliver training programs that help them adapt to a changing climate.

She explains how and why women and children are  disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, and what Ripple Effect is doing to ease the burden on women, children and their households.

Sofanit also explains how other stakeholders can come on board to support this kind of work, ensuring that more and more communities get support to build resilience and
secure a healthy future for themselves and their children.

Sofanit signs off the show by sharing what she wants the upcoming COP27 climate conference in Egypt to deliver in November. Enjoy the show!

Learn more about Ripple Effect on LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube and on their website.

The post Hali Hewa episode 5: Female farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.

As their numbers grow, these climate migrants have settled in an estimated 20,000 hectares of timber plantations, clashing with the wood industry and government.

While other African countries have established policies to address climate migration, the Zimbabwean government has opted for evicting the migrants from the plantations.

Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa has called them “illegal settlers” or “squatters”. He claimed during a public event in July that “timber poaching, illegal mining and settlements in the plantations continue to affect” the timber industry.

Migrants declined to be interviewed for this article, for fear of reprisals. Some have previously described to international media how harsh conditions in their home villages drove them to move.

Gift Sanyanga, a coordinator for Haarlem-Mutare City Link, Dutch cooperation organization aiding migrants, said they had no real alternatives. “Unless better adaptive and community resilience building measures are in place in areas of origin, climate-induced migration is likely to remain a big issue,” Sanyanga said.  

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Over the past decade, Zimbabwe has been hit by severe recurring droughts. In 2019, drought and economic meltdown pushed 7 million people in Zimbabwe into severe hunger, equivalent to half of the country’s population, according to estimates by the World Food Programme.

Climate-related displacement have been widespread in Africa during the last decade, according to the lastest UN climate science report. Migrations to urban areas have particularly increased in sub-Saharan Africa due to drought and household vulnerabilities. 

In Zimbabwe, the eastern highlands bordering Mozambique, have become a popular destination.

There, migrants cut and burn swathes of forest to plant crops, timber industry officials report. Some are allegedly involved in illegal gold mining, tearing tracts of standing timber in search of the illusive precious mineral.

New homes and land cleared for cropping in timber plantations in Chimanimani (Photo: Andrew Mambondiyani)

The timber plantations include Martin Forest, Tarka Forest, Gwendingwe Forest and Cashel Valley Estate in Chimanimani district, Vumba Forest in Mutare district and many other timber plantations in Nyanga, Mutasa and Chipinge districts.

Industry body the Timber Producers Federation (TPF) estimates 20,000 hectares are affected. While there are no independent estimates available, ground reports suggest that figure is realistic.

The TPF further claims the companies are losing millions of US dollars each year in export earnings. The value of timber exports stood at more than $20 million in 2021, the TPF reported.

During a public event in July this year, president Mnangagwa called on political leaders, government departments and agencies to “decisively reverse deforestation” in the province by clearing “undesirable activities within our forestry plantations”.

Darlington Duwa, chief executive of the TPF, said the timber industry was “disheartened”, as it had yet to witness removal of illegally settled people.

“Rather than receding, the challenge seems to be worsening as reports indicate that there are new settlers that have moved onto plantations in recent weeks,” Duwa said. “It is no exaggeration that unless the situation is addressed, the future of the timber industry in Manicaland [province] is bleak.”

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Some countries in Africa including Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania have come up with policies to address climate migration like the Migration and Climate-informed Solutions (MACS).   

Others are adapting to climate threats so vulnerable people do not have to move. The city of Beira, in Mozambique, has developed the Beira Master Plan 2035 to make the city resilient to rising sea level and flooding.

Joseph Maposa, a resident in Chimanimani district, said he was worried that the destruction of timber plantations would expose the residents to the effects of heavy winds, cyclones and storms.  

Cyclone Idai which hit some parts of Zimbabwe in 2019 had devastating effects, with more than 1,300 casualties in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique. Experts said some of these impacts could have been mitigated by forest cover.

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Experts say drought and severe water shortages have compounded instability and conflict in Afghanistan for decades and are worsening a humanitarian crisis precipitated by the withdrawal of US and allied troops.

Afghanistan is in the grips of its second drought in four years. Since 1950, Afghanistan’s average annual temperature has increased by 1.8C, according to the climate security expert network. Heavy rainfall events have increased by between 10-25% over the past 30 years.

14 million people, around 35% of Afghanistan’s population, were already facing acute food insecurity before the Taliban takeover, according to the World Food Programme (WFP). Half of all Afghan children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition.

The UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan Ramiz Alakbarov told Reuters last week that Afghans are facing a double threat: conflict and drought. “You have a kind of combination effect of displacement caused by war and by military hostilities compounded with displacement caused by drought and by the difficult economic conditions,” Alakbarov said.

Oli Brown, associate fellow at Chatham House, told Climate Home News that food insecurity will increase in the next few months as snow makes roads in parts of the country completely impassable. “Unless you have a working system of governance to provide a safety net before the snow comes in, people will get stuck,” he said.

Afghans have found themselves caught in a vicious cycle of climate change and conflict for over 40 years. “One creates conditions for the other,” said Brown. Water and land scarcity have increased community-level conflict, poverty and instability, which in turn have driven environmental degradation and the depletion of resources.

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Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense extreme events, such as droughts and flash flooding, to the country in upcoming decades. More frequent droughts could boost the drug economy as opium poppies flourish in warm, dry climates.

Opium poppies are drought-resistant, easy to grow and transport, according to Brown. “Where wheat fails,  opium poppies often survive,” he said. 

“Increased opium revenues continue to fuel armed opposition groups and encourage corruption among government officials,” said Janani Vivekananda, a senior advisor on climate change and peacebuilding at thinktank Adelphi.

Afghanistan’s climate plan, submitted to the UN in 2015, outlines that all the country’s 34 provinces are highly vulnerable to climate impacts, including drought, heatwaves and glacial lake melts. Water stress is a major concern as 80% of the country’s population relies on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods. 

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The climate plan said $2.5 billion was needed for watershed management and $4.5 billion for the restoration of irrigation systems by 2030. But investments in boosting water and climate resilience over the past decade have been insufficient, experts say.

Vivekananda said that this issue is likely to be “kicked into the long grass” as development aid is suspended and the immediate focus shifts to humanitarian aid. “It is incredibly critical that this is not seen as a long-term issue, but rather as a priority issue for stabilising the situation now,” she said. “It underlies any hope of addressing the longer term humanitarian needs of the Afghanistan population.”

Brown said international partners, including the US, did invest in building new irrigation channels, but that it is unclear how many of these were properly maintained. 

Improvements to irrigation systems in some cases increased poppy cultivation and opium production, according to a report by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR).

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President Joe Biden has decided to finish evacuating US troops from Afghanistan by 31 August, an administration official said on Tuesday.

In the past week since the Taliban took the capital Kabul, thousands of Afghans have fled the country, including government officials, journalists and translators for western forces. Thousands more are camped in Kabul airport hoping to get a seat on a plane.

As western powers lose their appetite for foreign intervention, a return to Taliban rule for the country looks all but inevitable. The hardline Islamist group, which enforces a strict version of sharia law, was removed from power by US-led forces in 2001.

Ensuring water access and protecting people from severe climate impacts is critical to the governance of Afghanistan, said Vivekananda. “Providing safe, predictable and regular water would be an opportunity for the Taliban to prove their legitimacy and show good governance.”

“It is the essential resource for agriculture, which is essential for the economy and provides the vast majority of livelihoods,” said Brown. “If the Taliban care about the Afghan people, they are going to have to care about water.”

The post Afghanistan at risk of hunger amid drought and Taliban takeover appeared first on Climate Home News.

They say wheat, maize (known also as corn) and soya are all likely to suffer substantial damage by the end of the century. And while increased irrigation could help to protect them against the growing heat, that will be an option only in regions with enough water.

Their report, published in the journal Nature Communications, says the effects of a warming atmosphere will extend far beyond the US. But as it is one of the largest crop exporters, world market crop prices may increase, causing problems for poor countries.

The lead author of the study is Bernhard Schauberger, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. He says: “We know from observations that high temperatures can harm crops, but now we have a much better understanding of the processes.”

Trump's pick for environment chief, Pruitt, says climate science "subject to debate" – hearing as it happened: https://t.co/xydRiuZDEj pic.twitter.com/rTUJUHDz9z

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) January 19, 2017

The team compiled what they say was an unprecedentedly comprehensive set of computer simulations of US crop yields. The simulations were shown to reproduce the observed strong reduction in past crop yields induced by high temperatures.

Because it will be impossible to alleviate harvest losses in water-short regions through irrigation, the authors say that eventually the only way to keep the losses in check will be through limiting global warming – in other words, reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human use of fossil fuels.

For every single day the temperature remains above 30°C, they find, maize and soya plants can lose about 5% of their harvest. But that is only the start. The simulations performed in the study show how quite small heat increases beyond this threshold can result in “abrupt and substantial yield losses”.

Without efficient emission reductions, they report, harvest losses from higher temperatures of 20% for wheat, 40% for soya and almost 50% for maize can be expected by the end of this century. Extremely high temperatures, above 36°C, are expected to lower yields still further.

The fact that increased heat in the atmosphere can damage crops has been well established since the dawn of agriculture. Scientists know that there is a delicate balance between potential gains and losses under a warmer climate.

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They know too that grain yields in Europe could also fall by 20% – not by 2100, but half a century earlier. The precarious plight of some of the world’s most fertile soils has reinforced concerns about future harvests, whatever the damage caused by the climate.

And, again from the Potsdam Institute, there was a recent warning about the impacts of climate change on crop yields and therefore on consumers, not least in developing countries.

But Schauberger and his colleagues have broken new ground with their study. It explains that nowhere on Earth, not even a country as powerful as the US, can expect to ride out the climate storm that is brewing.

It shows the scale and pace of the havoc that is already unfolding in many places, and the risk of “abrupt and substantial” harvest losses. And it leaves no doubt of the probable impact on international trade in a hungry and more populous world.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Global warming to shrink US harvests, say scientists appeared first on Climate Home News.

Scientific evidence is the foundation of robust adaptation policies that tackle water management, energy and food security, the study says. Without it, the climate impacts that are already plunging Africa into a humanitarian crisis are poised to get much worse.

But patchy weather records, most of which lay abandoned in meteorological offices and are unlikely to ever be digitised, make the African climate system among the planet’s least understood.

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The study, produced by the Future Climate For Africa initiative, a joint program of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), finds that while Africa is poised to get hotter and its weather more erratic, most government departments are only planning short term, therefore failing to respond to slow onset environmental changes.

“It is difficult to model through computers, which makes predictions of future rainfall under climate change challenging,” said John Marsham, one of the authors at the University of Leeds, in the UK.

Although scientists know that both dry spells and heavy rainfall are likely to increase, whether some regions will get wetter or drier remains unclear.

Marsham also said that poor funding and the fact that the data are rarely shared with the scientific community are deepening the crisis.

“Long term decisions that do not account for climate change risk serious negative impacts” Marsham said. “Water supply, irrigation and drainage infrastructure built now need to be designed for the water availability, water needs and flood occurrence of the coming decades, as well as the present.”

Countries are increasingly embracing preparedness, and initiatives for adaptation in agriculture often include climate risk in their agenda.

The Adaptation of African Agriculture, presented at the UN climate talks in Marrakech this week, is one of the programs that builds on research and scientific evidence to devise practical solutions.

It connects governments and farmers in fields such as soil management, agricultural water control, as well as risk management.

“Africa, long neglected, can no longer be ignored. Today, it is an active, respected partner in the debate on global governance,” said Moroccan King Mohammed VI at the launch of the initiative.

“Cooperation, which is already intense with many countries at the bilateral level, will be further expanded and revitalized.”

But to create a robust, long term climate response strategy, funding from developed countries needs to keep flowing.

Teresa Anderson, climate and resilience expert with ActionAid, said that every dollar invested in prevention and resilience saves seven dollars in humanitarian response. “But donor countries prefer to wait until the crisis is in the news before responding to it, by which time is too late to make a real impact.”

She said that rich nations should ramp up their financial contribution to climate response, and makes no concessions to the US President-elect who vowed to slash climate aid.

“No country lives in a bubble, in a world where this year was the hottest ever recorded and 400 million people were affected by drought there is no space for climate denialism. The American people need to be aware that they live in the rest of the world,” she said.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

The post Africa flying blind as continent tips into climate crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

A gaucho herds cattle in Rocha, Uruguay. Beef is the country’s top export (Flickr/ Eduardo Fonseca Arraes)

By Alex Pashley

Uruguay government official Ramon Mendez has paraded arrays of wind turbines to visiting trade missions in his time directing the country’s energy policy.

Cubans, Chileans, and Mongolians have swooned over the country’s shift away from fossil fuel dependency. A trip to slowly-emerging Myanmar is next.

The attention is deserved. For Uruguay – better known for its legalisation of marijuana and folksy former president Jose Mujica – now gets 95% of its electricity from renewable sources.

A decade earlier, tankers shipping oil and coal sourced its growing power needs. With limited resources and its rivers dammed for hydroplants, a gas pipeline with Argentina was in the works.

Analysis: Latin America needs stronger climate pledges
Report: Pragmatic Peru to crisis-hit Venezuela: Latin America at COP21

Then in 2008, the government set about a grand overhaul of policy.

“We had to increase our energy sovereignty, not for ideological reasons, but because it’s crucial for a small country like Uruguay to be as independent as possible,” says Mendez, speaking from Montevideo.

An unmistakeable signal from government and a streak of strong economic growth shored up investor confidence. Imports of turbine blades and photovoltaic panels followed.

Renewables now make up 55% of its total energy mix, he says. An 88% cut in carbon emissions by 2017 compared with the 2005-2009 average was the country’s contribution to last year’s Paris climate agreement.

A few natural gas plants remain on back-up, when low rainfall shuts down hydro plants and the wind drops. “We cannot control nature,” adds Mendez, its chief negotiator in Paris.

(Flickr/ Gonzalo Viera Azpiroz) Turbines in Sierra de los Caracoles in eastern Uruguay

Technology has transformed its power sector, but its impact is muted in agriculture: Uruguay is a leading beef producer.

Cows outnumber its 3 million population four-to-one. Reared on its grassy plains, beef makes up 70% of its exports, worth $1.5 billion in 2013. Export income made up a quarter of GDP that year, according to the World Bank.

The country is grappling with the issue. In the Paris pledge, it aimed to cut the methane and nitrous dioxide produced per kilo of beef by a third. Burping cows produce 80% of its methane, while manure accounts for almost two-thirds of NOx.

“Uruguay cannot mitigate climate change at the expense of food production, but rather work on improving the efficiency of the emissions per product in the sector,” its UN submission read.

But production surged by three-and-a-half times over that decade and isn’t set to slow.

Report: Why does the meat industry escape climate scrutiny?
Climatarianism: the low carb(on) diet you’ve never heard of

Mendez says hungry consumers in foreign markets should bear some of the burden – its exports feed ten times its population, he argues.

But experts warn surging levels of meat consumption aren’t compatible with limiting warming to ‘safe levels’ of a 2C temperature rise this century.

“It’s very clear that considerable growth from the livestock sector in terms of consumption on the global level, even allowing for improvements in production is going to mean you will almost certainly overshoot 2C,” said Antony Froggatt, a researcher at London think tank Chatham House who follows the sector’s environmental footprint.

Expanding forests will offset residual carbon emissions from the power sector, yet the developing country can only cut so much, Mendez says.

“When all the climate change difficulties came 100 years ago, we still had 12 million cows. It’s part of the landscape.”

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(Pic: Irish_farming/Flickr)

By Joseph Curtin

Ongoing climate negotiations are progressing along multiple tracks at the UN, but one issue remains stubbornly peripheral to the agenda.

Unlike Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+), agriculture has no specific work programme at the UN’s main climate body.

This is out of kilter with the importance of agricultural activities, which are directly responsible for approximately 15% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).

When the impact of deforestation is included, this rises to approximately 20% – which is comparable to all global transport emissions.

Approximately one billion people are going hungry every day. With a growing population, food production must increase by an estimated 70% by 2050, resulting in more emissions.

But, ironically, this will further undermine agricultural productivity, which is highly vulnerable to climate change.

Against the grain

Historically, climate negotiators and policy makers have paid relatively little attention to this nexus of concerns.

Efforts to place them more centrally on the agenda have been resisted for a number of reasons, most recently at negotiations in Cancun in 2010.

There is sometimes assumed to be a trade-off between addressing hunger on the one hand, and emissions from agriculture on the other. But there need be no such trade off (see, for example, here and here).

Furthermore, the main focus of developed economies is on the energy sector, because it accounts for the majority of emissions. Ireland is an exception.

Emissions from farming could slashed by up to 30% if farmers adopt better techniques, says the UN’s Food + Agriculture Organisation (Pic: UGA/Flickr)

Meanwhile, in developing countries, the main focus is understandably on adapting agricultural systems to cope with the impact of climate change, not on reducing emissions.

Another factor is the arcane and complex nature of measuring emissions from land use and agriculture, which make it a bit of a beast to tackle.

Problems could emerge from downplaying agriculture. If it’s not central to an agreement, reducing emissions from agriculture might not be eligible for climate finance flows.

Money could potentially flow to adaptation without any consideration of mitigation, or even food security, whereas a more holistic approach could yield greater dividends. Some of these issues are being considered at the ongoing climate negotiations in Bonn (4 to 14^th June, 2014). Further details are available in this FAO briefing.

Climate smart

There is a groundswell of support for a more integrated approach to looking at the agriculture sector.

The UNDP, the World Bank, the FAO and others have called for policy leaders to take an integrated approach to these challenges by focusing on “climate-smart” agriculture (CSA).

CSA is an approach to developing the technical, policy and investment conditions to achieve sustainable agricultural development for food security under climate change.

It seeks to support countries to put in place the means to mainstream and operationalise climate change considerations into agricultural sectors.

At the instigation of the Dutch Government, a roadmap has been agreed for the formal launch of an Alliance on CSA at the Climate Summit in September in New York, which is being convened by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the UN.

The IIEA has been invited to join as an official Friend of the proposed Alliance. Another noteworthy initiative is the creation of an African CSA Alliance, convened by the African Union.

There is another somewhat less discussed prospect for mainstreaming agricultural considerations.

Negotiations have begun on the EU’s 2030 climate and energy policy framework.

The European Commission’s communication on the framework references the possibility of agriculture and land use being considered under “an explicit separate pillar” (in addition to the two existing pillars of the Emissions Trading (ETS) and non-ETS sectors which already exist).

Irish Minister for Agriculture, Simon Coveney T.D., described this as a “major breakthrough” in negotiations dealing with emissions from agriculture at EU level.

Irish leadership

Ireland has the single most challenging policy environment for its agricultural emissions of any country in the world.

Agriculture in Ireland accounts for 40% of non-Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) emissions, three times the EU average. Under EU law, non-ETS emissions must be reduced by 20% by 2020 – the most challenging target of all EU Member States.

Yet the Irish Government’s strategy envisages a very significant increase in output from the agri-food sector by 2020, with growth projected to continue to 2030 and beyond.

The Irish EPA therefore project that emissions from agriculture will increase rather than decline in the period to 2030.

These apparently contradictory policy objectives also present a significant opportunity for Ireland.

The climate-food nexus is one of the most intractable problems facing the world, yet internationally the time is right to take positive steps to tackle this challenge. Ireland can be a global leader and a test bed in doing so in at least three ways.

First, it can act as a test bed for CSA by deploying the technologies, techniques and practices currently available, and by undertaking the R&D to develop the next generation of technologies, techniques and practices, thereby ensuring the evolution of a national and global carbon-efficient food production system.

Some in Ireland argue that this is already happening, and indeed there are examples of international best practice, not least the Origin Green sustainability programme that operates on a national scale.

However a far more wide-reaching, coherent and ambitious strategy, focused on cost-effective mitigation and sequestration, is required.

Second, Ireland can act as test bed for the transfer of appropriate CSA knowledge, technology and practices to developing economies. Again, promising public sector and NGO initiatives exist which can be built upon.

Finally, Ireland can continue to play a leading role in promoting greater consideration for agriculture at EU, UN and other fora. This could include playing a leading role in the emerging Global Alliance on CSA.

These are three highly complex and multi-faceted agenda items. All merit careful consideration by national and international stakeholders, experts and policy makers.

Joseph Curtin is a Senior Research Fellow at the the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA)

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(Pic: Ian Mannion/Flickr)

By Ed King

Do you want to save the world from catastrophic climate change?

One thing you can do, right now, is stop eating meat and dairy products.

That’s a conclusion from scientists in a paper published in the Climatic Change journal, which assesses the growth of greenhouse gas emissions from the farming sector.

They say nitrous oxide from fields and methane from livestock are projected to rise from 7.1 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) in 2000 to 13GTCO2e in 2070.

This would make limiting warming to a maximum of 2C, as agreed by governments in 2009, impossible to achieve, say the scientists.

They believe changing what we eat and drink is essential: “Only by also assuming reduced meat and dairy consumption do we find agricultural emission levels that do not take more than half of the total emissions space in 2070.

“We therefore conclude that dietary changes are crucial for meeting the 2C target with high probability.”

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, as countries develop the average protein intake per citizen increases, as does meat consumption.

This poses a growing problem, as portions of food from methane-generating animals such as cows and sheep have far higher carbon footprints than other foods.

A 2011 study from the US-based Environmental Working Group calculated lamb generates 39.3 kg of CO2e per kilo, while beef comes in at 27.1kg CO2e per kilo.

That’s 13 times more than vegetable proteins such as beans, lentils and tofu.

Dairy and meat farming in Latin America is far more carbon intensive than other regions (Pic: Climatic Change)

Speaking to RTCC, Fredrik Hedenus, one of the study authors, admitted their findings were “controversial” and said it would likely “take a long time” to change the average diet.

“We should already be thinking about how we can make our food more climate friendly,” he said.

He added that total emissions from eating meat and dairy products could be much higher, since land use change and the carbon footprint from animal-feed were not included in his calculations.

Water use is another factor not factored in. One kilo of beef is estimated to have a ‘water footprint’ of 15,415 litres, just ahead of sheep (10,412) but behind chocolate (17,196).

The study also illustrates the need for farmers in the developing world to learn more efficient rearing and production techniques.

Latin American emissions per kilo of milk or meat are on average five times those of Europe – especially significant since Brazil is the world’s largest beef exporter.

In the UK dairy farmers have committed to a 20–30% reduction of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions by 2020 based on 1990 levels.

Ceris Jones, climate change adviser at the UK National Farmer’s Union, told RTCC farmers are taking further steps to address their environmental impacts.

“The NFU is concerned about climate change projections not just for their possible domestic but also their international effect because farming is on the frontline of climate change impacts,” she said.

“The agricultural industry in England is playing its part in tackling the causes of climate change by committing to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 11% by 2020.”

The post Kill the cheeseburgers to stop global warming – report appeared first on Climate Home News.

Source: Flickr/innoxiuss

By Gerard Wynn

Food crops will gain little nutritional value from the higher yields expected as a result of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, shows research to be published in a UN report next week.

The studies suggest that more optimistic views of the impacts of climate change on crop yields this century may be misplaced.

The UN report, leaked online, is the second of a three-part review which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes every five to six years on the threats posed by global warming.

Next week’s study reports on climate impacts, where the outcome for food production is probably the most critical, alongside sea levels.

Many studies on food impacts of climate change produce two sets of results, with and without the effects of carbon fertilization.

For example, one study published earlier this month and referred to in next week’s IPCC report, found that the number of malnourished people worldwide could rise by 27 million in 2050 as a result of the effects of more intense droughts and floods.

However, the number of malnourished people would fall by 37 million people after accounting for carbon fertilization, according to the paper, published in the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

Plant growth

Photosynthesis is the process where plants use light to drive chemical reactions which capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and convert it into sugar, providing the fuel for almost all life on Earth.

Enzymes in the leaf can react with oxygen instead of CO2, however, leading to a much less efficient process called photorespiration.

Some plants, called C4, such as maize, have adapted specially to avoid this outcome, by deliberately trapping the CO2 first and then releasing it in a separate part of the leaf where sugar is produced.

In this way, it is more likely to run on CO2 than oxygen.

Most plants do not have this adaptation, and their output is reduced by about a quarter as a result of photorespiration.

Such C3 plants, including most food crops, run more efficiently at higher levels of CO2, leading to the effect called carbon fertilization as atmospheric carbon levels rise from burning fossil fuels.

Less protein

Carbon fertilization hikes crop yields but reduces nutritional value, found studies published in the latest IPCC report.

A wide-ranging review of some 228 experiments found decreases of 10 to 14% in the edible portions of wheat, rice, barley and potato, when grown at higher levels of CO2.

Elevated CO2 can also lower the nutritional quality of flour produced from grain cereals, according to various studies published in 2009 and 2010.

Mineral concentrations were affected as well as protein.

Studies found decreases in zinc, sulphur, phosphorus, magnesium and iron in wheat and barley grain, increase in copper, molybdenum and lead, and mixed results for calcium and potassium.

“Overall, there is robust evidence and high agreement that elevated CO2 on its own likely results in decreased nitrogen concentrations,” the IPCC said. Nitrogen is the main constituent of protein.

“Nutritional quality of food and fodder, including protein and micronutrients, is negatively affected by elevated CO2,” the IPCC added.

While such crops will contain less protein and fewer nutrients, the level of calories may be unaffected, however, and so the impact on human health will depend on which aspect a particular consumer most lacks.

“Since calorie intake is the primary concern in many food insecure populations, even if intake of minerals is decreased, those negative effects could be outweighed by increased calorie intake,” the IPCC report said.

“In assessing impacts on health, current diets must be considered. Decreased mineral intake will matter for those who currently do not meet, or just barely meet, requirements, but will not affect those who already exceed requirements. Little is known about combined effects of climate change (CO2) factors on food quality.”

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(Pic: CIAT)

By Gerard Wynn

Scientists are gradually narrowing uncertainty over the impact of climate change on food production, pointing towards a more pessimistic picture.

The degree to which people can adapt to climate change is part of a wider debate about the urgency of cutting carbon emissions.

Adaptation is especially relevant to agriculture, as one of the most dangerous potential effects of climate change, alongside sea level rise.

The risk from climate change is especially great because a growing, increasingly affluent global population will require a 60% increase in global food output by the middle of the century, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Responses to climate change include ploughing up more land, investing in crop breeding, cutting food waste and increased international trade. The latter would help compensate for lower yields in hotter climates by allowing access to higher yields in cool, northern countries.

Agricultural economists complain that the issue does not receive enough attention, given the scale of threat to global food security.

“The good news is that agriculture features much more prominently than it did in the past,” said Gerald Nelson, at the University of Illinois, in an email correspondence, referring to a forthcoming publication by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the global impacts of climate change.

“The bad news is that the food chapter is still only 35 pages long. I’m arguing we need to have the IPCC do an in depth study of food security and climate change.”

IPCC

The forthcoming report of the IPCC, to be published at the end of this month, will conclude that climate change will cut crop yields worldwide this century regardless of the potential for such adaptation.

“With or without adaptation climate change will reduce median (crop) yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of this century as compared to a baseline without climate change,” the report finds, in a final draft summary leaked online and dated October 28.

That appears to be a more negative outlook than the IPCC’s previous equivalent report, published in 2007.

“Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase with increases in local average temperature over a range of 1-3 degrees Celsius (warming above 1980-1999 levels), but above this it is projected to decrease,” the 2007 report concluded.

Lower yields will throw more emphasis on alternative farming responses, where recent research suggest that increasing the farmed area may be the most significant.

Adapt

Two journal articles published last December tried to try to pin down the potential for adaptation, by comparing the output of a range of global economic, climate and crop production models.

The authors of both papers found that farming innovations could reduce the negative impact of climate change on yields, but that the impact was still negative.

“While just the climate change effects (result in) a 17% negative yield hit on average, the final yield hit is only 11%, again on average,” said the lead author of both papers, Gerald Nelson.

Countries would respond by ploughing up more land, increasing the farmed area by an average 11%, the authors estimated, in a paper published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, called “Climate change effects on agriculture: Economic responses to biophysical shocks”.

That could not entirely compensate for the fall in yields, with an average global drop in production of major crops expected. And the authors calculated an increase in prices, which could hit the world’s most vulnerable households.

The second paper, published in the journal “Agricultural Economics”, called for more research, against the backdrop of a more negative picture generally over the last two decades.

“A summary of the literature on the effects of climate change on agriculture has witnessed a transition from relative optimism to significant pessimism,” found the authors of the paper, “Agriculture and climate change in global scenarios: why don’t the models agree”.

“In part the transition reflects gradual improvements in data availability and improvements in modelling, both biophysical and socioeconomic. But it also includes differences in underlying assumptions about adaptation implicit in the choice of modelling technique.”

The post Scientists hint at negative impacts of climate change on farming appeared first on Climate Home News.

Source: Flickr/dave_mcmt

By Sophie Yeo

McDonald’s has pledged to buy verified sustainable beef starting in 2016, but one problem remains: they have yet to define what they mean by ‘sustainable’.

The fast food giant announced on their website that they aspire to source all of their beef from ‘verified sustainable sources’, beginning in two years’ time.

The company operates over 34,000 restaurants in 119 countries. It serves over 75 hamburgers every second, and its American customers alone are responsible for eating 5.5 million cows every year.

So a decision to serve sustainable beef could have a huge impact on the company’s carbon footprint. A report released by the UN in September said that livestock is responsible for 14.5% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Report: Brazil beef and soya exports driving Amazon deforestation

“This sounds simple, but it’s actually a big challenge because there hasn’t been a universal definition of sustainable beef,” the company has written on its website.

Unlike products such as coffee and fish, which have bodies certifying whether or not they classify as ‘sustainable’ according to strict criteria, beef has no such rules.

There are lots of elements that the new definition needs to encompass, including the environment and animal welfare. McDonald’s has said that its vision includes optimising the “cattle’s impact within ecosystems and nutrient cycles” as well as having a positive impact upon employees and communities.

Beef currently represents about 28% of the company’s carbon footprint. Cattle are widely recognised as one of the most carbon intensive food sources. Of all the emissions produced by all livestock globally, the greenhouse gas emissions produced by cows during digestion amounts to 39%.

In 2011, McDonald’s joined forced with a variety of stakeholders including environmental campaign group WWF to develop a set of principles for the beef industry. They have created the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, which has drafted a set of best practices, in what McDonald’s calls “a breakthrough for the beef industry”.

But this is complicated by a fragmented supply chain that makes it difficult to create one set of rules.

“The beef industry is large and complex. Different farmers, locations, and parts of the beef supply chain do things according to a variety of local, national, and industry expectations,” said Michele Banik-Rake, director of sustainability of the McDonald’s supply chain.

“In the past, this has made it impossible for us to apply a single standard for sustainability to our beef purchases.”

But it could take a while for the company’s aspirations to be fully realised. Bob Langert, the vice president of global sustainability at McDonald’s, said in an interview with Green Biz that the company isn’t ready to commit to the specific quantity of sustainable beef that it will purchase in 2016, or setting a deadline on its eventual goal of 100% sustainability.

“We will focus on increasing the annual amount each year,” he said.

The post McDonald’s announces move towards sustainable beef appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: CIAT)

Higher rainfall due to climate change could decimate Kenya’s maize-friendly regions, while simultaneously making previously desolate areas more receptive to agriculture, reveals a new report.

Released by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA), the report advises farmers, which make up 75% of the country’s work force, and officials to put resources in place to take full advantage of this shift.

“As long as we offer farmers the right services and policies now, and more options in what they grow and where they grow it, Kenya can make a major transformation in its ability to cope with the changing climate,” said Timothy Thomas, a research fellow at IFPRI and co-author of the analysis.

“Climate predictions for Kenya’s most important crop, for example, tell us where maize farmers may need to shift to other crops, where they might need to introduce drought-resistant varieties, and even new areas where maize can grow.”

Research

Predictions produced in the analysis of how climate change will affect farming in Kenya used data from four different climate models to assess the impact on crop yields at over 6,000 locations.

One revealed rising temperatures could make maize production impractical in parts of the Rift Valley Province and cause yields in Coast Province to fall as much as 25%.

Another offered a very different scenario: it showed growing conditions actually improving throughout the country, boosting maize yields everywhere

All showed rainfall increasing in certain arid and semi-arid regions of Kenya, such as Kitui, Samburu and Isiolo counties, which would allow maize to be grown in places that previously have been too dry to support the crop.

Models showed that some areas in higher elevations, which may have been too cold for maize to thrive in the past, would be warm enough for maize to grow in the future.

“Despite the uncertainties, the science clearly shows us that big changes are likely to occur and we need to have a number of options available so farmers can adapt to the new conditions they will encounter,” said Michael Waithaka, a co-author of the report, who leads the policy analysis and advocacy programme at ASARECA.

“The best way to do that is to strengthen the agricultural research institutes, so they can develop new varieties and other innovations, and also support the extension services that are crucial to delivering new ideas and practices to farmers.”

The post Kenyan farmers warned climate change may impact crop yields appeared first on Climate Home News.

Cattle farming is responsible for 18% of GHGs. (Pic: kevinzim)

Dung beetles can be used to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cow pats, say researchers from the University of Helsinki.

Dung pats left on fields are a known source of both methane and CO2, but dung beetles have been found to modify the composition of dung by increasing oxygen levels.

“We believe that these beetles exert much of their impact by simply digging around in the dung. Methane is primarily born under anaerobic conditions, and the tunneling by beetles seems to aerate the pats. This will have a major impact on how carbon escapes from cow pats into the atmosphere,” said Atte Penttilä, who undertook the study.

Agriculture and food production have been found to be some of the major sources of greenhouse gases responsible for climate change, with 18% produced by cattle farming.

According to the US Food and Agriculture Organization, agricultural methane output could increase by 60% by 2030. The world’s 1.5 billion cows and billions of other grazing animals emit dozens of polluting gases, including lots of methane.

By comparing old dung pats with and without beetles, the team found that emissions from six-day old pats without beetles were five times higher than emissions from pats with beetles.

The beetles were found to enhance the drying of dung pats and increase the availability of oxygen in the deeper parts of the pats, thus reducing the creation of methane.

Researcher Eleanor Slade, said, “Overall, the effects that we found are intriguing, but the implications also quite worrying.

“When you combine the current increase in meat consumption around the world with the steep declines in many dung beetle species, overall emissions from cattle farming can only increase.”

The post Dung beetles reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cow pats appeared first on Climate Home News.

Agriculture can help itself by investing in renewable energy and cutting its carbon emissions. (Source: SAS)

By Nilima Choudhury

Climate scientists have predicted maize and wheat yields could fall by 19-30% by 2065, a disparity which has now been solved by researchers at Princeton University.

It’s a hugely important issue, as maize and wheat are staple foods for up two-thirds of people around the world.

The report in the journal Global Change Biology is one of the first to compare the agricultural projections generated by two different models – empirical, from field observations, and mechanistic, from laboratory tests.

Under the hotter, wetter conditions projected by the climate scenarios they used, the empirical model estimated that maize production could drop by 3.6 %, while wheat output could increase by 6.2%. Meanwhile, the mechanistic model calculated that maize and wheat yields might go up by 6.5 and 15.2%, respectively.

It offers more evidence that empirical models show greater losses as a result of climate change, while mechanistic models may be overly optimistic.

“A yield projection based only on empirical models is likely to show larger yield losses than one made only with mechanistic models. Neither should be considered more right or wrong, but people should be aware of these differences,” associate research scholar Lyndon Estes said..

“People who are interested in climate-change science should be aware of all the sources of uncertainty inherent in projections, and should be aware that scenarios based on a single model — or single class of models — are not accounting for one of the major sources of uncertainty.”

Despite the disparities, climate scientists, governments and charitable organisations agree that climate change will adversely impact agricultural output.

Although agriculture is acknowledged to provide the primary source of livelihood for many people, it is also reported to cause up to one third of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to researchers.

Farming emissions

A significant portion of these emissions come from methane, which, in terms of its contribution to global warming, is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

According to the US Food and Agriculture Organization agricultural methane output could increase by 60% by 2030. The world’s 1.5 billion cows and billions of other grazing animals emit dozens of polluting gases, including lots of methane.

Speaking to RTCC Dr. Jonathan Scurlock, chief adviser to the National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales, said it was important to be aware of the whole picture.

“There is a tendency to blame the whole of food production for being a significant source of GHG emissions because if you actually drill down into the details, agriculture is responsible for 8.5% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

But he made it clear that the sector was not averse to the idea of making changes in order to mitigate climate change.

“The agriculture industry as a whole does take responsibility for its greenhouse gas emissions – we have negotiated with government ambitions for reducing our contribution to the national greenhouse gas budget,” said Dr Scurlock.

He said the simplest solution would be to switch from burning fossil fuels to low carbon energy, but before that, changes to farming practices need to be made.

“If we want to eat we want to be able to grow crops. What we can try and do is be more efficient in the way we manage agriculture and more efficient perhaps through clever genetics, gradually making crops more nitrogen efficient to reduce that down to a minimum figure – same thing with methane from ruminants to animals.”

The post Will climate change hit maize and wheat production? appeared first on Climate Home News.

America’s cattle herds will shrink – not in number, but in weight and yield – as the climate warms, according to new research that delivers an ominous warning for farmers.

An extensive study of bison − those great wild cattle that evolved to graze the prairies of North America − has confirmed that animals from warmer, drier grasslands weigh considerably less on average than those from cool, wet ranges.

Cattle weight loss could jeopardise food security and cut farmer’s profits (Source: Niels Linneberg)

Joseph Craine, a researcher from Kansas State University’s Division of Biology, reports in the Public Library of Science journal PloS One that he analysed weight, age and sex data from 290,000 animals in 22 herds throughout the US.

He found that the average seven-year-old male bison in South Dakota weighed 856kg (around 1900lbs), while counterparts in Oklahoma clocked in at 596kg (1300lbs).

Ominous change

The difference in mean annual temperature between the two ranges was 11°C, and the two sets of values told an ominous story of change in a warming world − not just for wild bison, but also for domestic cattle.

The world is almost certain to warm by more than 2°C on average in this century, and the rise could be as great at 4°C.

“We know that temperatures are going to go up,” Dr Craine says. “We also know that warmer grasslands have grasses with less protein, and we now know that warmer grasslands have smaller grazers. It all lines up to suggest that climate change will cause grasses to have less protein, and cause grazers to gain less weight in future.”

As temperatures rise, precipitation is likely to fall, with consequences for plant growth. If the same reduction in weight gain applies to beef cattle as to bison, the finding is “a pretty clear indication” of bad news for food security and for the graziers.

There are around 500,000 bison in the US – the species was all but extinguished during the 19th century – and more than 90 million cattle. Dr Craine calculates that each 1°C rise in average temperatures could cost farmers $1 billion in profits, either through direct reduction in weight gains or in the costs of additional supplementary feeds.

Dwindling size

The research is in line with other findings this year. As reported in January, evidence from 55 million years ago − when the world warmed by 6°C – was unearthed during drilling in the National Science Foundation’s Bighorn Basin Coring Project in Wyoming. It indicated that animal size tended to dwindle with rising temperatures, almost certainly in response to changes in nutritional value.

The implication that mammals could dwarf and humans shrink towards hobbit-like stature under a changing climate was tragically confirmed by a study of body heights among children in north-east Brazil.

In response to near-starvation conditions, children who were brought up on a diet of rats, snakes and cacti reached an average adult size of only 1.35 metres (4ft 6ins).

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Skinny cows and climate change could cost farmers billions appeared first on Climate Home News.

Here is some very limited advice on how to reduce your carbon footprint in suburban America: if you have a lawn, dig it up and plant a crop of maize. And if you live in Minneapolis, sell up and move to Miami.

Two research papers in two journals have looked at two of those either/or questions that keep academics busy and dinner parties animated. Researchers at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, decided to look at what happens when farmland is converted to urban property.

So for 10 weeks in the autumn of 2011, they visited and sampled the carbon dioxide release, soil moisture and temperatures, from urban lawns and from fields of corn, known also as Zea mays.

They report in the Soil Science Society of America Journal that freshly mown grass sward won the dubious trophy for high greenhouse achievement. That is because lawns, on average, were hotter.

Lawns can strengthen the urban heat island effect (Source: Flickr/Super-structure)

“As you increase temperature, you increase biological activity – be it microbial, plant, fungal or animal,” said David Bowne, a biologist at the college. More biological activity meant more respiration, and more carbon dioxide releases.

The higher lawn temperatures seem to be part of the urban heat island effect. Cities, notoriously, are much warmer than the surrounding countryside: roofs, roads, pavements and parking lots are dark, and absorb more sunlight, raising the ambient atmospheric temperatures overall.

What the researchers had not quite expected, however, was to observe the effect on such a local scale. The research team found that urban development just 175 metres from a test location can cause an increase in temperature. The research is a small part of a much larger, global effort to understand what changes in land use do to climate.

Warmth is costly

“If we go from one land use to another land use, how does that impact carbon cycling which in turn can affect climate change? Our study touches on one component of that cycle, and more research is needed to address this huge topic,” said Dr Bowne.

Meanwhile, over at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michael Sivak asked himself the question: which demands more energy, air conditioning or central heating? He reports in Environmental Research Letters that he compared the costs of climate control in America’s warmest large city, and its coldest: Miami and Minneapolis respectively.

The question isn’t an easy one: both air-conditioning and central heating systems use energy, but do they do so with comparable efficiency? One runs on electricity, the other sometimes on natural gas or oil.

Even in Miami, people occasionally need to turn up the thermostat. Minneapolis, like any mid-Western city, can become uncomfortably hot, so both cities use both forms of climate control.

The answer however proved to be quite straightforward. Professor Sivak concludes that the cost of staying comfortably warm in Minneapolis requires 3.5 times the energy needed to stay cool in Miami. Miami’s advantage might be even greater, if only because humans tend to tolerate heat rather more good-temperedly than cold.

“The traditional discussion of climatology and energy demand concentrates on the energy demands for cooling in hot climates,” Sivak writes. “However, the present results indicate that the focus should be paid to the opposite end of the scale as well.”

This story was produced by the Climate News Network

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Changing the way rice is grown, from planting it in flooded paddy fields to drier soil cultivation, is dramatically increasing yields and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The results of trials in eleven countries show that yields increased by an average of 60%, although they varied sharply  between states, from an 11% increase to 220%.

A paper published in The Geographical Journal, the scientific publication of the Royal Geographical Society of London, says the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI, is having such success that 50 countries are now adopting it.

The method evolved in Madagascar over two decades but can now be applied in all rice-growing countries. Four studies in India, Indonesia, Kenya and Mali showed that production costs fell by 20-32%, and profit per hectare rose between 52% and 183%.

In China, which has adopted SRI on a large scale, yields increased, but – just as important for a country short of water – 22.6% less irrigation was needed.

Fluctuations in rice production because of changes in rainfall is common

SRI involves growing rice in aerated soil instead of flooded paddies. Single young seedlings are planted with regular wide spacing, and soils are kept moist but not wet. Nutrients are placed in the soil next to the plant rather than spread randomly.

The method reduces the costs of land preparation, seed, fertilizer and water use, and cuts methane emissions, while achieving the increased crop yields. Rice grown by the new method has bigger roots, and the larger plant produces more and heavier grains.

The environmental benefits, apart from the reduction in methane emissions from the flooded paddies, include a lower need for tractor power and the labour required before the crop is planted.

Farmers’ health

Less seed is needed for fewer, stronger plants.  Achieving this with less fertilizer means saving greenhouse gases in production, and less irrigation also saves the amount of fuel needed for water pumps.

In areas where arsenic in water is a problem – like Bangladesh – this new method reduces arsenic contamination in crops and soil. There are also health benefits to farmers and labourers working in dry fields rather than flooded ones. SRI also reduces the mosquito population and therefore malaria.

It is proving a success in all 50 countries which have adopted it across Asia, Africa and Central America. Despite this, one obstacle to exploiting this potentially huge boost to yields is getting the message to farmers, say the researchers, Amir Kassam, convener of the Land Husbandry Group at the UK Tropical Agriculture Association and Hugh Brammer, former United Nations agricultural development adviser to Bangladesh.

Educating the poor farmers who will benefit most is an uphill task because in many African and Asian countries they have little or no institutional backup, or sometimes because governments have collapsed altogether.

The researchers suggest that modern communication devices – mobile ‘phones, computers and television sets – could be used to educate the farmers. Non-governmental organisations “with their closer contacts with rural people than most government officials” could play a valuable role both in testing ideas and obtaining feedback.

SRI and another longer-established method of cultivation, called in the US no-till agriculture, where land is not ploughed but seeds are drilled direct into the topsoil, are the best hope of increasing food production.

No-till agriculture, or conservation agriculture (CA) as it is called elsewhere, works well on poor soils where erosion is a problem and mulch is applied to keep moisture and nutrition in the soil.

The paper concludes: “In the coming decades CA and SRI appear to offer the best hope of increasing food production rapidly, at low cost and without adverse environmental consequences in developing countries where human populations are increasing most rapidly.”

The Geographical Journal, March, 2013: Combining sustainable agricultural production with economic and environmental benefits, Amir Kassam and Hugh Brammer.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Climate resilient rice offers hope to Indian farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate change may force American farmers to alter where they grow crops and to spend millions of dollars more tackling weeds, pests and diseases, a report says.

It urges them to consider this as a risk they may have to manage.

The report, by the US Agriculture Department, says American farmers have managed to adapt to environmental changes for nearly 150 years. But the accelerating pace and intensity of global warming in the next few decades might soon overwhelm it.

“We’re going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production,” said Jerry Hatfield, a plant physiologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. “In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says 2012 was the hottest year in the US since record-keeping began in 1895, overtaking the previous record by 1°F (-17.2°C). The country suffered its worst drought in over 50 years.

The report’s authors say US cropland agriculture will resist climate change fairly well during the next 25 years. Farmers will be able to minimize the impact of warming by changing their timetables and using crop varieties more resilient to drought, disease and heat. More use of irrigation and moving production to regions with a more clement temperature will also help.

But by mid-century adaptation becomes more difficult and expensive as crops and livestock need to become ever more adaptable, something which will leave their productivity increasingly unpredictable. Temperature increases and more extreme swings in precipitation could cause yields of major crops to fall.

The US ongoing drought has damaged  portions of the major field crops in the Midwest, particularly field corn and soybeans

This is because higher temperatures will cause crops to mature more quickly, reducing the growing season. Faster growth could cut grain, fodder, fibre and fruit production if nutrients or water run short.

Among the biggest threats is an increase in the cost of weed control, which could reach more than $11 billion annually.

Warmer weather will be ideal for weeds but can also stunt the growth of traditional crops like grains and soya.

The entire US is likely to warm substantially during the next 40 years, by1 to 2°C over much of the country, the study says. The rise is likely to reach 2 to 3°C in many inland regions.

It says climate change will harm livestock by affecting an animal’s optimal core body temperature, which could hurt productivity. Warmer and more humid weather is likely to increase the prevalence of insects and diseases, further damaging animal health.

The report, by a team of authors from the federal government, universities, the private sector and other groups, involved a review of more than 1,400 publications  which examined the effect of climate change on US agriculture.

In a separate report, the USDA looks at literature reviewing the impact of climate change on the country’s forests. This showed the most visible and significant short-term effects on them will come from fire, insects, invasive species or a mix of all three.

Wildfires are likely to increase throughout the USA, causing at least a doubling of the area burnt by mid-century.

“That’s the conservative end,” said Dave Cleaves, a climate change adviser with the USDA’s Forest Service. “We can’t just stand back and let these natural conditions occur.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Climate change promises tough future for US farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.

Energy, water and land are being squandered as the world throws out as much as half the food it produces.

A report, Global Food: Waste Not Want Not, by the UK’s Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) has found that 30-50%, or 1.2-2 billion tonnes, of produced food is wasted by poor storage, bad distribution and exacting quality standards in the developed world.

“As water, land and energy resources come under increasing pressure from competing human demands, engineers have a crucial role to play in preventing food loss and waste by developing more efficient ways of growing, transporting and storing foods,” said Dr Tim Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

“But in order for this to happen Governments, development agencies and organisation like the UN must work together to help change people’s mindsets on waste and discourage wasteful practices by farmers, food producers, supermarkets and consumers.”

With the global population set to top 9 billion with scarce water and energy resources and climate change making conditions for farmers even harder, cutting waste could help to reduce surging food prices.

“Most people don’t realise that food waste is not only a moral conundrum  wasting food when so many people are hungry, but an environmental problem as well,” Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of the Food Tank told RTCC.

Some supermarkets, including Waitrose in the UK have begun selling ‘ugly’ fruit and vegetables, that would otherwise be discarded. (Source: Flickr/Sean_Hickin)

“We forget that all of the resources and ingredients, that go into making food,artificial fertilizer and other agrochemicals, water, soil fertility, fossil fuel energy, etc, are also wasted when we either food is lost because of pests, disease, or improper storage or because we simply throw it away.”

Agriculture uses 2.7 trillion cubic metres of water a year, that’s 70% of all freshwater use. Wasting 2 billion tonnes of food also means wasting 35% of the world’s fresh water supplies.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk report identified water scarcity as the top societal threat facing the world.

Water is also under increasing demand from the growing populations, industrialising nations and to fulfill an expanding appetite for hydropower.

Improper rice storage can waste 80% of harvests between farm and table. (Source: Flickr/katushau)

Hydropower rich Brazil is currently facing a water and energy crisis following a dry summer. India recently announced plans to build 292 dams in the Himalaya to solve its energy crisis but there are concerns the resulting effect on water supplies could be worse.

While improved farming techniques have improved crop yields, land degradation from poor management and aggravated by climate change means 12 million hectares of land become barren each year.

The IMechE report, notes that just one hectare can provide enough rice or potato for 22 people a year.

“At a time when 870 million go to bed hungry each night, and climate change is already acting as a break on crop yields and pushing up food prices, our waste of food cannot continue,” Tim Gore, Oxfams’s international policy advisor on climate change.

“With demand for food set to increase in the years ahead, we must change our wasteful behaviour in rich countries, boost investment in small scale farming in poor countries, and slash the greenhouse gas emissions that are increasing the costs of feeding a warming world,” he told RTCC.

As nations develop, the appetite for meat also increase placing additional pressures on the amount of land required to feed the population.

According to the IMechE report, producing 1 calorie of food requires 7-10 calories of energy input. As agriculture becomes increasingly mechanised this figure could rise.

Meeting fuel and electricity demands for agricultural production, storage and transport with sustainable sources is essential, IMechE claims.

The post Colossal food waste hitting energy, land and water supplies appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last year’s natural disaster racked up an estimated $160bn worth of damages, according to the world’s largest reinsurance firm Munich Re.

Hurricane Sandy was the single costliest event at $50bn in what was a fairly mild year for the insurance industry. Losses in 2011 were $400bn.

While it is hard to directly link one specific event to climate change, rising sea levels exacerbated the effects of Sandy’s flooding. Water in the East Coast’s harbours is 15 inches higher than in 1880 and warmer air and sea temperatures encourage greater storminess and so extreme weather.

Flooding from Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge stretched hundreds of kilometres along the east coast of the US. (Source: Flickr/Jim.Greenhill)

“The heavy losses caused by weather-related natural catastrophes in the USA showed that greater loss-prevention efforts are needed,” said Torsten Jeworrek, Munich Re board member.

“It would certainly be possible to protect conurbations like New York better from the effects of storm surges. Such action would make economic sense and insurers could also reflect the reduced exposure in their pricing.”

There are calls for great levels of financial support for climate adaptation from the private sector. Reducing emissions provides more obvious routes to making money from climate change investment leaving preparedness and risk reduction further down the priority list.

Agriculture

The US also witnessed a drought only beaten for severity by the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

Total agricultural losses were $20bn with the additional human costs expected later this year as the knock on effect of high food prices takes hold.

Preparing farmers for climate change in both the developed and the developing worlds is one of the core strategies to protect food security as weather patterns become increasingly variable.

“The [developing world] farmers are on the forefront of climate change and are very worried about the outcomes for their farms and livelihoods,” said Bruce Campbell, director of Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program at the CGIAR agricultural research consortium.

“Farmers are actively trying to counter climate-induced problems – for example by diversifying, changing planting dates, and switching to less susceptible crops or livestock. However, their options are often limited because of weak markets, lack of advice and lack of policy support,” Campbell told RTCC.

While better information can help farmers to make the right choices, Campbell believes there is role for financial mechanisms to support developing country farmers.

“There are some very promising innovations. One of these is index-based insurance – millions of farmers are now covered by these schemes in India and there are smaller schemes in many countries in Africa. Insurance protects farm and livelihood assets – if extreme events eat into assets then it is a downward spiral for livelihoods,” he said.

Loss and damage

A potential new regime of climate finance was initiated at the UN climate change talks in Doha. Loss and damage would come into play after adaptation efforts have failed.

Although still very much in the early stages, it is thought that those countries with a historical responsibility for climate change would contribute to a fund to absorb some of the losses felt in developing nations.

Based on the figures released by Munich Re, loss and damage costs far outstrip the recent climate finance payments of around $10bn a year.

2012 Natural Disasters – Biggest Economic Losses 

Hurricane Sandy $50bn

US drought/agriculture $20bn

Italian earthquakes $16bn

US tornadoes $5bn

The post Natural disasters cost $160bn in 2012 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Halving nitrogen fertiliser use in China could significantly decrease greenhouse gas emissions without affecting crop productivity, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that a 60% reduction in fertiliser use could significantly reduce emissions in areas that are already ‘over-fertilised’, such as the North China Plain and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River Basin.

Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) is 2-300 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, and is the third highest contributor to climate change behind CO2 and methane. It is also widely used in China, due to generous subsidies provided to farmers by the state.

China currently meets 22% of global food demand, and as the world’s population grows to an expected nine billion in 2050 – feeding the world while addressing climate change will become an increasing problem.

Researchers say that since the 1990s the rate of crop production has slowed in these areas has slowed, suggesting the fertilizer has become less effective.

“Nitrogen fertiliser has become less efficient in recent years as the nitrogen input has surpassed nitrogen demands of plants and microbes. Excess nitrogen is not stimulating plant growth but leaving the system through leaching and nitrous gas emissions,” said report co-author, Dr Hangin Tain.

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Ahead of the UN climate summit, in Doha, researchers have warned that mitigating the impacts of agriculture on the atmosphere and adapting to the effects of climate change on food systems will be equally crucial to feed a growing population.

Feeding the world produces up to 17,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide annually, according to new analysis from the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

This accounts for 19-29% of global emissions, around 80% of which comes from agriculture, with the rest from pre-production and post-production activities such as processing, packaging, refrigeration, transportation and waste disposal.

CGIAR stresses that there are still many uncertainties regarding the impacts of the food system on climate change.

But while the ‘footprint’ of global food systems must be reduced, a companion brief from CGIAR outlines how climate change is not only impacted by food production but how climate change may affect which crops can be grown where.

New research warns climate change could impact the relationship we have with food in the future, as what can be grown where changes.

“Climate change mitigation and adaptation are critical priorities,” said Bruce Campbell, CCAFS’s programme director. “Farmers around the world, especially smallholder farmers in developing countries, need access to the latest science, more resources and advanced technology.

“This research serves as an urgent call for negotiators at the upcoming UNFCCC [summit] in Doha.”

Last year, the world population hit seven billion and is expected to rise to nine billion by 2050.

One billion people continue to go hungry globally, while another two billion suffer from ‘hidden hunger’ where they do not get the nutrients they need for a healthy diet.

Feeding a growing world

By 2050, according to the research, climate change could cause irrigated wheat yields in developing countries to fall by 13% and irrigated rice production in the same countries could fall 15%.

In Africa maize yields could fall 10-20% as they become unsuited to rising temperatures.

Additional calorie and protein sources could also suffer as feeding livestock with maize and grain becomes more expensive, reducing the ability for farmers to rear meat sources.

Related articles:

Fighting climate change with smart agriculture

UNEP: Eight steps to feed a growing world

Biofuels: who wins in the fuel v food debate?

The availability of fish will also be impacted because of rising temperature levels and ocean acidification.

While there are some crops – cassava, yams, barley, cow-pea  millet and lentils – that could fill in the gaps, this would mean the time consuming and costly process of breeding new plant varieties, says CGIAR.

It says that the culture of food consumption will have to adapt as different crops are used to compensate for new growing conditions.

“So far, the climate change discussion has focused on the need to reduce emissions and sustainably boost crop yields, but it is crucial also to include food safety in our foresight and planning,” said Sonja Vermeulen, head of research at CCAFS.

Recommendations

CGIAR suggests several steps to securing the food system in a world of advancing climate change:

– Financing initiatives to ensure food systems become more resilient to weather variability and climate shocks.

– Reshape consumption patterns to ensure nutritional needs are met and promote sustainable and healthy eating patterns.

– Raise global investment in sustainable agriculture over the next decade.

– Develop specific programmes to aid populations and sectors most vulnerable to climate change and food security.

– Establish robust emergency food reserves.

The post Mitigation and adaptation critical to guaranteeing food security appeared first on Climate Home News.

Protecting the environmental foundations of the world’s food systems will be crucial to feeding a growing population, according to a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Last year, the world population hit seven billion and is expected to rise to nine billion by 2050.

One billion people continue to go hungry, while two billion suffer from ‘hidden hunger’ where they do not get the nutrients needed for a healthy diet.

The latest report, Avoiding Future Famines, warns that unless nature-based services, such as fertile land, freshwater supplies and nutrient recycling, are built into agriculture and fishery planning the world will not be able to feed the growing population.

Overfishing, unsustainable water use, environmentally degrading agricultural practices and other human activities are all putting the security of our food system under threat.

Agriculture provides 90% of the world’s caloric intake, but the industry faces threats from unsustainable practices.

Food shortages are not just a future problem. Drought in the US this summer caused rises in food prices across the world, as grain crops failed.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimate that by 2030, agricultural land in the developing world will increase by 120 million hectares. Climate change will continue to exacerbate the threats facing agriculture however.

Over-use of water in irrigation systems, poor land management and the use of fertilisers could all threaten future agricultural systems.

In the oceans, 32% of fish stocks are either over exploited, depleted or recovering from depletion, while 35% of mangroves and 40% corals are also destroyed and degraded.

Unsustainable fishing practices, including bottom trawling and dredging, continue to threaten fish stocks.

“The era of seemingly ever-lasting production based on maximising inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, mining supplies of freshwater and fertile arable land and advancements linked to mechanisation are hitting their limits, if indeed they have not already hit them,” said UNEP Executive Director, Achim Steiner.

“The world needs a green revolution but with a capital G: one that better understands how food is actually grown and produced in terms of the nature-based inputs provided by forests, freshwater and biodiversity.”

Eight recommendations to feed the world

The report offers recommendations to shore-up the natural foundations and improve food security:

– Build centralised storage and cooling facilities for small-scale farmers to get produce to market quicker and avoid waste.

– Promote sustainable diets, in particular the lower consumption of meat and dairy products in the developed world.

– Re-consider food quality standards that lead to unnecessary waste.

– Design sustainable agriculture not only at local, but national level including improved soil management and efficient water use.

– Develop economic strategies including eliminating subsides which contribute to over-fishing and habitat destruction, providing incentive for sustainable fisheries and increasing taxation on harvest volume and fines on illegal fishing.

– Introduce maximum yields of marine fishing.

– Create networks of Aquatic Protected Areas.

– Reduce land-based pollution that lead to dead-zones in coastal areas.

Related articles:

Biofuels deal agreed at UN biodiversity summit

UN biodiversity chief calls for political urgency on environment

CBD COP11: Agriculture must not be excluded from biodiversity talks

The post UNEP: Eight steps to feed a growing world appeared first on Climate Home News.

Beef production in Brazil is estimated to be responsible for 60 to 70% of the deforestation in the Amazon basin (Source: acmoraes/Creative Commons)

Pastureland has been identified as the leading driver of deforestation in many parts of Latin America.

But when considering alternative land uses – like the growing of soya beans and oil palm – it’s not necessarily an “either-or” question, says Pablo Pacheco, a scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research.

Much of the land used for agricultural expansion occurs on pastures formerly used for ranching, he said. Those who have been “displaced” often tend to cut down forests in search of new land to till or graze.

So, in terms of sustainable development, Pacheco notes, it’s rarely a question of “do we want more grazing pastures or land for agriculture.”

Rather, he says, the discussion ends up being “either [pasture] or more [pasture carved out of the forest by ranchers that have been displaced by agricultural expansion].”

Instead of arguing about which activity causes more tree loss, policy makers should focus on “a combination of measures to close the frontier and improved land management in already consolidated agricultural frontiers. Higher social inclusion is also required.”

In simpler terms, that means reducing forest conversion in agricultural lands at the edge of intact forest; stimulating higher productivity of crops in these border regions and better cattle herd management; all while ensuring that small-landholders stay in the equation.

Growing global demand for beef and edible oils have bumped arable land under cultivation to a stunning 532 million hectares in recent decades, according to 2010 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation data.

In the roadmap forward, Pacheco says it is important to squeeze the most out of land that has already been deforested.

Take for example, soybean cultivation in the Mato Grosso region of Southern Brazil, bordering the Amazon rainforest. A 2011 literature review points out that 80% of direct deforestation in the region is due to land clearing for cattle rearing and 20% from soy cultivation.

However, a lot of soy cultivation is on already deforested pastureland.

Soya expansion, Pacheco says, “forces cattle production deeper into the forest.” Furthermore, as available pastureland reduces, “market conditions may encourage soybean production to ‘leap-frog’ into areas of primary forest ahead of ranching.”

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In a recent paper, Pacheco writes about Brazil and Colombia— two countries and crops which constitute the largest acreage expansion in the region. In his paper, Pacheco discusses how oil palm and soybean cultivation tends to expand on pasture lands, thus placing relatively limited direct pressure on forests. However, the benefits tend to be concentrated among large-scale landholders, in the case of oil palm and with medium- and large-scale landholders, industry and trade brokers in the case of soy cultivation.

And this is a problem that needs to be analysed, Pacheco says.

In considering agricultural expansion, it is important to ask whether farmers and ranchers, big and small, are getting the same access to knowledge, technology and capital.

While soybean and oil palm development has brought money to rural parts of Brazil and Colombia, much of that wealth is concentrated among middle to large-scale land holders.

So far, small scale land holders own just 20% of oil palm plantations in Columbia; the rest are large-scale landholdings. In one of Brazil’s major soy-growing regions, Mato Grosso, 77% of soy growing farms is made up of farms larger than 1,000 hectares.

In defence of large-scale plantations, some agricultural economists argue that small-scale operations tend to lead to lower productivity.

“From a conservation perspective, closing the agricultural frontier and improving yield in already converted lands seems important, to the extent that more productive lands could protect forests. But sustainable development is also a social issue,” says Pacheco. “It is not enough to say that small land holders diminish yields. With some technical assistance, these small holders might bring up their productivity.”

“Supporting smallholders, traditional communities, and indigenous people should become a key element for any pathway to sustainability,” he adds. “They have the capabilities to contribute in significant way to food security and environmental stability.”

Melati Kaye is a writer for the Forests News blog at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

CIFOR is a nonprofit, global facility dedicated to advancing human wellbeing, environmental conservation and equity. Their research and expert analysis helps policy makers and practitioners shape effective policy, improve the management of tropical forests and address the needs and perspectives of people who depend on forests for their livelihoods. 

Other Forest Week Articles:

Video: Uniting climate change adaptation and mitigation in the Congo Basin

Challenges mount for REDD+ as scheme prepares for implementation

The role of forests in combating climate change

Five facts you may have forgotten about forests

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Latest news – Friday 7 September

1600: New research suggests deforestation could significantly reduce rainfall in the Earth’s tropical regions.

This could have major implication for farmers in these areas, such as the Amazon and Congo forest basins, as well as reducing hydro-electricity output.

1500: As the concern over food production grows, attentions turn to Europe’s pollinators including bees and hoverflies.

Pollinating insects contribute to agriculture production of 84% of European crops – either partly or entirely – and the value of these insects has been estimated at €22 billion a year inEurope.

1400: Firms are quickly catching on to the fact that the best way to market sustainable living is not to lecture but to nudge people into changing behaviour and making sustainability fun, says business writer Oliver Balch.

1300: Edward Cameron and Yamide Dagnet from the World Resources Institute offer a comprehensive look at where countries stand following the Bangkok talks and what’s next ahead of the COP18 conference at the end of the year.

1200: The one billionth certified emission reduction credit under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) will be issued today, according to the UN climate secretariat (UNFCCC).

1100: BusinessGreen provide a round-up to Obama’s speech last night, and the lines he drew between himself and Mitt Romney on the environment and energy.

1000: Scientists in the Arctic are warning that the record-breaking melt seen this summer could be part of an accelerating trend with profound implications.

Researchers from the Norwegian Polar Institute said impacts could be felt in Europe and beyond. They expect to see much more precipitation in Northern Europe, while warning Southern Europe could become drier.

0900: New Zealand’s High Court has dismissed a challenged launched by climate change sceptics against a government research agency’s findings that the temperature had risen in the past century. The court backed the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s conclusion that New Zealand’s climate warmed almost 1°C between 1909 and 2009.

0830: Geologists from the British Geological Survey say warm water held in a network of disused coalmines could supply 40% of Glasgow’s heating. The technique has said to have already been demonstrated locally in one of Glasgow’s housing projects.

Accepting his party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, President Obama called the 2012 election a pivotal moment in the battle against climate change, criticising Republicans who say global warming is a myth.

African farmers are finding new ways to cope with drought, erosion and other effects of climate change but will need even more techniques to thrive in an increasingly unpredictable environment, say scientists.

A survey of 700 households in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania found many smallholders are now planting more drought-resistant and faster-growing crops to ensure harvests continue.

Top tweets

Not quite as exciting as @leodicaprio‘s hybrid, but still good… ‘Green’ #Pope presented with #electric car bbc.in/TusK0C via BBC

— Lang Banks (@LangBanks) September 7, 2012

bit.ly/P6CDAtWe are loosing ground with man-made deserts overrunning fertile #land & subsistence #farmers in SSA among most affected

— Luc Gnacadja (@LucGnacadja) September 7, 2012

President Obama: “My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet—because climate change is not a hoax.”

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 7, 2012

Thanks @barackobama for telling it like it is on #climate change.

— Kelly Rigg (@kellyrigg) September 7, 2012

The post Climate Live: Glasgow’s disused mines to heat the city, African farmers find ways to tackle drought and Obama says climate change is “not a hoax” appeared first on Climate Home News.

The US Department of Agriculture has warned that food prices in 2013 could increase at nearly twice the rate of inflation due the severity of the drought currently gripping 31 of the country’s states.

Price rises are also expected globally next year, as other big exporters hold onto their own supplies, further decreasing availability in the market. Among the worst affected are the most vulnerable countries that are heavily reliant on imports.

The global ‘futures’ market means that crops are often sold before they are even picked – affecting prices for years to come. For instance, in 2010 a Russian drought sent prices of wheat and barley soaring the following year.

This hybrid corn crop in Kenya has been bred to resist drought. (Source: Flickr/CIMMYT)

The weather affecting crops is nothing new – a famous example is the series of droughts in the 1930s that left parts of America and Canada resembling a ‘dust bowl’.

But these severe types of weather event are predicted to occur with increasing frequency, if last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the ‘Risks of Extreme Events’ is to be believed. And given the way the world economy is interconnected – an impact on one continent will reverberate around the globe for years to come.

Some, including the US Department of Defense, the Maplecroft consultancy and IISS researcher Jeffrey Mazo have even suggested that climate-induced food shortages played a role in the Arab Spring.

Cash crops like coffee and cocoa, which are grown across relatively small areas can be severely affected. Starbucks has sought to protect its own supply by helping its growers “climate proof” their crops.

The challenges facing farmers have been described as the “perfect storm”, so what are the big issues and what can be done to limit the reverberations?

Many of the tools and technologies required to reduce the impact of erratic weather are available now. A great many more are under development or waiting for the right policies to catalyse them.

A number of factors contributed to wheat prices jumping from $700 on the 25 June 2012 to $940 in late July. (Source: Forex)

Population

“The current world population of 7 billion is projected to reach 9.3 billion by 2050,” explains Dr Darren Hughes, head of communications at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research centre in the UK.

“Coupled with other factors, particularly people moving from rural livelihoods to cities, rising global temperatures and extreme weather events becoming more frequent, an enormous stress will be placed on our natural resources and therefore our ability to provide adequate nutritious food and to safeguard our environment through clean air, soil and water.”

Population is clearly a huge challenge facing food security, but there is an argument that the fault lies not with the earth’s future inhabitants, instead the problem is with how we, the current population, produce inefficiently and consume so wastefully.

Waste

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a global research partnership focusing on food security.

A report by its Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change in March 2012 makes a painful read. A stand-out stat is that while in 2008 1.5 billion adults were overweight, in 2010, 925 million people were undernourished.

Here’s another one: the UK wastes 22% of its food (the global average is estimated at 33% by the FAO).

VIDEO: Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change – How to feed the world in 2050

Behaviour

Diet changes and cuts in waste at home, at the farm and along the supply chain can make a huge difference.

One of the major contributors to the strain on agricultural supplies is the growing volume of meat consumed. According to Cornell University, the grain used to feed livestock in the US could feed 800 million.

Some campaign groups – notably the US Department of Agriculture – have called for a “Meatless Monday” as a way for the west to cut its protein input.

Cutting meat intake in emerging economies could be even more crucial however as China’s total annual meat consumption is now double that of the US, although the latter is still way out in front in the per capita stakes.

Making the supply chain smarter and enabling farmers to make better decisions could have a big impact too. Improving storage throughout the chain, cutting superficial quality control standards and upgrading processing facilities in developing countries could cut masses of waste before the food hits the shelf.

Land degradation

It’s not just waste we should be concerned about – poor land management also contributes to the problem. Writing for RTCC, the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Luc Gnacadja, said that every year land degradation removes an area of agricultural land capable of growing 20 billion tons of grain.

Desertification is not an unstoppable process. Land can and has been restored to agricultural standards.

The Great Green Wall project in Africa will see a 4300 mile long and 9 mile wide line of trees planted to cut soil erosion by the wind, reduce dust storms and create rural economies. South Korea is undergoing a huge project in Mongolia to limit the effect of wind-blown dust from its degraded lands.

RELATED STORIES:

Obama administration backs biofuels as triple win for military, economy and agriculture

Can farmers fight climate change, lower their CO2 emissions and keep the world’s growing population fed?

Off the menu: The climate change food crises

Information

Information for all farmers, no matter how small, is a key weapon.

“In the short term we are looking at how better climate information can help farmers plan for the upcoming season,” says Vanessa Meadu, communications manager at CGIAR. “Information could be delivered by mobile phone, community radio or through local information centres.”

Gallup suggests 57% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa has a mobile phone providing a widescale platform for data to help farmers adapt. In many cases, longer term adaption is needed, and this requires finance.

A number of development banks including the European Investment Bank, NGOs and even enterprising entrepreneurs are helping support small scale agriculture. Micro insurance schemes can ensure that if a farmer suffers a bad harvest, it needn’t be their last.

Technology

Technology also has a role to play but implementation is again tied to policy.

“Crops can be adapted to future conditions through breeding,” says Meadu. “Researchers are working on identifying important genetic traits, including drought tolerance and pest resistance, which will be critical for helping farmers adapt to new growing conditions. However, much more investment and policy support is needed for this kind of research.”

Hughes agrees adding that the nature of the problem requires policy from health, environment, agriculture, food and energy departments. These decisions however, must be well informed.

“There is increasing concern within the science and farming community that policy decisions, notably in the EU, are based on pure politics and not sound science,” says Hughes.

Biofuels

We really want to keep burning corn in our gas tanks, even as drought withers supply? fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2012/…

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) July 30, 2012

Biofuels policies have also been handled poorly in many countries with food unnecessarily displaced in the pursuit of alternative fuels.

“Right now, the US is suffering from extreme drought, making corn crop yields uncertain. The diversion of land that could be used to grow corn for food versus corn for fuel plays a more important role when certain areas of the US are having difficulty harvesting due to the drought,” ActionAid USA told RTCC in a written statement.

Population is clearly the greatest challenge facing food security, but the fault is not with the future inhabitants that could number nine billion by 2050, the problem is with how we, the current population, produce inefficiently and consume so wastefully.

Business as usual

The UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser has said: “The challenge for global agriculture is to grow more food on not much more land, using less water, fertiliser and pesticides than we have historically done.”

The challenges are clearly numerous, but so are the available solutions. Doing nothing is not one of them.

What do you think? What are the biggest threats to food security and what should we be doing (if anything) about trying to deal with it? Is it high enough up the political agenda? Tweet us via @RTCCnewswire or email the author.

The post The price of climate change: How to temper volatile food prices appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Obama administration has thrown its weight behind the biofuels industry in the wake of the Navy’s successful trials of the technology.

The Pentagon is one of the biggest backers of biofuels which it sees as an opportunity to buffer itself from fossil fuel price shocks. It is the largest buyer of fossil fuels in the world.

Despite this argument, there is a move in the US Congress to block the Department of Defense from investing in alternative fuels until they have price parity with their conventional counterparts.

Speaking after a successful trial by the Navy’s Great Green Fleet, the administration reiterated its ongoing commitment to biofuels.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus (blue shirt) observes an at sea biofuel replenishment by the Great Green Fleet. (Source: Flickr/USNavy)

Heather Zichal, President Obama’s deputy assistant for energy and climate change described moves to block investments in the sector as “short sighted and disappointing”.

Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus said his organisation was well placed to open the biofuels market to other sectors.

“The Navy [as a major customer] can help make biofuels price competitive,” said Mabus. “There were representatives from the airline industry on board the aircraft carrier during the trial. They’re also looking for alternative fuels.”

US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack highlighted the role that the sector has on the economy.

“There are 400,000 people already employed directly or indirectly by biofuels and this figure could rise to one million,” said Secretary Vilsack.

“This is not just about energy security, there is an opportunity to build a bioeconomy. It’s healthy for fossil fuels to have some competition and we already know that US consumers pay less at the pump because of the domestic ethanol industry.

“We can make biofuels a win for everybody; our economy, our military and our farmers,” said Vilsack.

Biofuels are criticised for displacing food production as the feedstocks for the fuels can sometimes offer a better return for farmers than growing crops for human consumption.

Vilsack moved to allay these fears saying that no crops or land for food would be replaced with energy crops.

Doubts

ActionAid USA has raised doubts over some of the claims made by the administration. They say that promoting biofuels,  ethanol in particular, will only drive up food prices in the long-term.

They also questioned Secretary Vilsack’s claims that no food would be displaced by the country’s growing biofuel industry.

“At best, if ethanol-bound corn is being processed as biobutenol it will perpetuate the current food and fuel competition. At worst, it could expand the amount of corn going for fuel instead of food or feed, deepening the competition for ever shrinking available land,” said the group.

RELATED LINKS

18 July 2012: US Great Green Fleet sets sail
26 April 2012: EU “will not abandon” biofuels in face of renewed criticism
6 March 2012: Gingrich calls US Navy backed algae biofuels “cloud cuckoo land”

The post Obama administration backs biofuels as triple win for military, economy and agriculture appeared first on Climate Home News.

Design is vital. Everyday we use objects and services which have been carefully designed and planned for us, often completely obliviously.

It would be impossible to imagine a more sustainable world which didn’t derive from the way these products and services are designed.

Equally how could transitions to the ‘green economy’, ‘the circular economy’ and ‘low carbon’ lifestyles would not be possible without the work of designers.

This is no one-way street. More and more often, consumers are looking for designers who are using recycled products, ethically sourced materials, or Cradle to Cradle principles.

Each year the New Designers exhibition showcases the best design graduates the UK has to offer – 3,500 of them over nine days.

I visited the designers of the future last week – here are five designs which I think can help shape the world we live in.

James Ward: Pitched Green Roof Tiles

Ward’s design aims to take Green Roofs to the mass market (not green tiles – roofs with plants on the top). Two main features make the design different from the traditional Green Roofs we have started see pop up over cities.

Firstly it uses carpet fibre as an alternative to soil – helping to solve the problem of old carpet materials ending up in landfill. Plastic tiles replace slate – and these can be produced out of recycled products.

Secondly the tiles are specifically designed for pitched roofs. Currently ‘Green Roofing’ is only available for flat roofing, but Ward felt this was missing a trick, as the majority of buildings outside of high-rise office buildings have sloping roofs.

The tiles are designed to slot together in a similar way to traditional roofing tiles, making it easy for people to install the roofing themselves, and the grips built into the tile holds the carpet fibres in place.

Green roofs help to serve several purposes including absorbing rainwater (helping to prevent flash flooding), providing insulation, creating a habitat for wildlife and they also help to lower urban air temperatures and mitigate the ‘heat island’ effect.

James says: “Green roofing and turning eco is the way forward. We have got to change our ways, all this gas guzzling is killing the environment. You look at cities and you look at reports and it is full of issues like the Urban Heat Island and water absorption issues.

“Green roofing helps to tackle all of these and it brings wildlife to the environment. It brings benefits to the environment but also people who live in these green roofed houses. It increases their insulation and brings down energy costs.”

Catlyn Adams: ChainGen Peddle Powered Water Pump and Electricity Generator

Using upcycled products (using waste materials and products for a different purpose to which is was built for) including drills, fire alarm batteries and an old bike, Catlyn Adams’ design aims to encourage the use of bikes in the developing world, while also aiming to provide solutions to problems such as access to water and electricity.

The basic frame is made of bamboo, although could be made of any material which is in constant supply for a particular community, providing the multi-purpose structure. The structure is the used to hook up a makeshift electricity generator and water pump – created from old drills and other upcycled products.

The structure also gives support to the bike, allowing it to be used as a wheelbarrow to carry water and agricultural products across land. The design is part of a wider social enterprise concept created by Adams, offering workshops and aiming to create products which will benefit and be tailored to local needs.

Catlyn says: “It is about trying to encourage the use of bikes in developing countries and encouraging human power rather than diesel power. Some areas can not use bikes all year round – because of punctured tyres, bad roads or maybe the rainy season makes the roads too muddy. It is about encouraging them not only to use bikes as transport but as these machines or as wheel barrows and different things like that.

“It is also about trying to encourage co-deign with the community. So the company ChainGEN itself could use a series of workshops – mainly about maintaining bikes – but would also work as a sort of consultant for the local people.”

“A lot of farmers are being tempted to more unsustainable ways because it is cheaper and it is what they know and it is what is accessible.”

Ben Kirkby: Arboform Chair

Created much in the same style as a traditional plastic chair, this design has a twist.

Created using arboform – a bio-material made from lignin, a by-product of the pulp industry and a waste product in paper manufacturing – the chair has very similar properties to one made from polypropylene.

The material is durable and the chairs should be as good as one made from any plastic. However, using a natural material this chair would be recyclable or biodegradable – a major selling point over traditional plastics.

Ben says: “It is obvious really. We are running out of oil so we have got to find new ways of making things.

“A lot of people when they think of green products it is all hippy and organic but why can’t it be like the plastic chair we are used to. That is what has kind of driven the form of this. It is subtly green, it is not shouting out I am a green product – it could very easily be made out of polypropylene – its subtle.”

Hamish Glover-Wilson: PowerFall energy awareness system

Designed for use within offices, the aim of the PowerFall design is to offer the incentives for behavioural changes for employees who do not have the financial incentives they would do at home.

The system monitors the energy consumption in an office and uses a simple and clear sign to help increase awareness among workers.

Small lights can be scattered around any office, turning red or green depending on the energy consumption of particular areas and products – red for bad, green for good.

A more complex and in-depth interface is then available to office managers and employees who are keen to learn more. Glover-Wilson explains how this could then lead to incentive schemes or competitions among staff.

Hamish says: “The idea is that it is a behaviour change and that it stretches further than just in the office and it will bring a more general awareness of the idea when we leave things on it uses electricity. It is a simple message but it is just trying to get that message across to people.”

“I did a lot of research on behavioural change and without the motivation it is very difficult. People aren’t motivated by climate change because it is geographically and in time quite remote. Until people are being affected now they don’t think about it.

“I am not a huge eco-warrior but it just seems a sensible way to act.”

Aston University: Shell Eco-Marathon Car

Winner of the Eco-Design Award at the Shell Eco-Marathon, the Aston University eco-car aims to be the urban car of the future.

Designed to pivot in on itself, making it smaller than a smart car when parked, the design uses cardboard honeycomb and plywood certified by the British Forestry Commission for the body and a bio-resign wing which would be 100 bio-degradable.

The whole structure is collapsible for easy delivery and the car is also equipped with a hydrogen motor.

Dave Hicks from Aston University says: “Sustainability is something what will get more and more important as the years go on, materials will run out and you will need to replace them.”

Charlie James says: “Energy intensive processes like steel work for example. We can’t carry on doing these sorts of processes and using lots of energy to create things that will only last 20 years. With larger population you are going to need something that is less permanent and more temperamental in terms of transport because there are a lot of automobiles just ending up in scrap yards after 20 years.

Related Articles:

– LIVING: Closing the Loop: Designing for a sustainable future 

– TECHNOLOGY: Plans for sustainable Abu Dhabi eco-Mosque get approval 

– LIVING: An introduction to sustainable fashion

The post Carpet tiles, bike powered generators & bio-degradable cars: Five sustainable designs to change your world appeared first on Climate Home News.

It has been described as the perfect storm for food production; dwindling water resources, unpredictable weather patterns and more mouths to feed.

The green movement has in the past pointed the finger at the agricultural community for its impact on forest clearances, fertiliser use and, in the developed world, a large carbon footprint from machinery and transport.

Farmers in the global north and south alike are facing similar challenges. Radical change is needed to mitigate and adapt to climate change whilst maintaining a high output, and the solutions to these problems are under scrutiny.

The debate over how to feed the world's growing population without intensifying environmental damage is highly complex. (Source: Flickr/UGA College of Ag)

So what can farmers do to boost production while remaining environmentally sustainable?

The technology route is one way out.

The agricultural machinery manufacturer New Holland believes one form of farming that its kit makes possible, could have a big impact.

No-till farming basically means you don’t plough your fields and you don’t remove the scraps from the last harvest.

Not disturbing the soil keeps more CO2 locked in and the nutrients from the rotting previous crop reduces the need for fertilisers.

For every hectare of land operated this way in Brazil, a tonne of CO2 is saved every year.

‘Idiots and lunatics’

“Many people think farmers are only bad for the environment but that is not true. Farmers today have accepted and realise that being environmentally sustainable is not a choice for them. Technology can help and there is huge potential for no-till but farmers need to be helped along,” Bernhard Kiep, VP New Holland Latin America told RTCC.

“Better education can show that farmers can have an economic return from switching to no till.

“No rational human being wants to destroy the environment. You must either be an idiot or a lunatic. If you explain to farmers that this technology will improve their land and their soil but that they need to be patient and invest in the long term, then they are switching.”

No-till does require special equipment, sold by New Holland amongst others, that allows farmers to work with the land and plant seeds in unploughed fields.

Dust rises in a field in Bangladesh as a farmer ploughs his field. (Source: UN/John Isaac)

Kiep says that the equipment is economical on medium and small sized farms – not just large industrialised ones – and that it can raise peasant farmers to economically successful farmers, a goal China’s government is targeting.

Encouraging farmers, which Kiep describes as traditionally “conservative” to invest requires tangible case studies to be communicated to them as well as the educational and institutional support necessary for the shift. Kiep is confident they will ultimately make the right decisions.

“Farmers are rational, they need to protect their soils, it’s the most important asset they have,” he said.

Is organic the answer?

Another high profile methodology that is widely touted is organic farming.

“Organic farming reduces pollution and greenhouse gases released from food production by restricting the use of artificial chemical fertilisers and pesticides,” said Clio Turton, spokesperson for the Soil Association, a charity that campaigns for sustainable food and land use as well as certifying organic produce in the UK.

“Our research has also found that if all UK farmland was converted to organic farming, at least 3.2 million tonnes of carbon would be taken up by the soil each year – the equivalent of taking nearly one million cars off the road,” added Turton.

The main criticism levelled at organic agriculture is that it leads to lower yields and puts crops at risk of disease. So would this change clear cars off our roads and food off our plates?

Turton points out that while there are 1 billion under nourished people globally, there are also 1 billion overweight, suggesting that the issue is as much about distribution as production.

A cereal bank in Niger where a patchy harvest contributed to rising food prices. (Source: UN Photo/WFP/Phil Behan)

“Organic and other agro-ecological farming systems can help the world feed itself, but as well as changing our farming systems, we need to eat differently, feed our livestock differently, and waste less food,” she said.

So how is the agricultural world responding?

“There are lots of signs that farmers globally are becoming more concerned with sustainable practices, whether in the uptake of approaches like integrated pest management and min-till, or indeed the rapid growth of organic farming worldwide,” says Turton.

Encouraging this continued sustainable trend is tricky however as not all that glitters is green.

“The challenge for us all, and particularly for policy makers and the food sector, is to provide a regulatory and market environment that channels that interest in the most effective direction. Biofuels is a case in point, where green sounding policies used farmers’ business nous and goodwill to support a massive own goal for climate change and food security.”

Paying for change

The CGIAR, a global agricultural research partnership, says prompting change in developing countries will require a persuasive argument.

“Poor farmers will not get on board with greenhouse gas cuts unless there are major incentives for them,” says Vanessa Meadu, spokesperson for CGIAR’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security programme.

“These incentives can include payments from the carbon market but they must also help enhance day-to-day life. For example, planting trees on farms can help reduce carbon emissions but for a poor farmer, trees are most valuable because they provide fruit, fodder, timber, shade and additional, diversified income,” she explains.

“They are adjusting their farming activities to climate changes, but not necessarily fast enough or in the most effective way,” says Meadu. “Farmers have been adjusting to changing conditions for thousands of years but the shifts brought by climatic changes are unprecedented and they may not have the tools to adjust nor any way to know what kind of changes are coming up.”

Farmers clearly have many options and lots of hard decisions to make as the conditions under which they operate become increasingly unpredictable and turbulent.

Helping them make the right decisions is a huge responsibility for governments, civil society and the research community and one that will impact us all.

RTCC VIDEO: Bernhard Kiep, New Holland Agriculture on the benefits of no-till farming

The post Can farmers fight climate change, lower their CO2 emissions and keep the world’s growing population fed? appeared first on Climate Home News.

According to Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD – the UN body dealing with land degradation – by 2030 the world will need to be producing 50% more food than it currently does.

How we do that is a matter of major debate. It’s generally seen as a question either of improving farming techniques, ensuring water is used more efficiently, developing more potent fertilizers or growing more durable plants – perhaps via genetic mutation (GM).

Or you could try yogic farming – a technique we came across while interviewing delegates at Rio+20.

I should stress we have no proof it works – but the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University – which has bases all round the world – swears by its effectiveness.

The theory goes as follows. In the same way people can feel good or bad vibrations from one another, seeds will react to the thoughts exposed to them.

It aims to combine thought-based meditative practices with methods of organic farming.

The process aims to combine Yoga methods with those of organic agriculture (Source: Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University)

“What farmers are doing is that they are taking the seeds and they are giving them the power of positive thoughts, through a higher state of consciousness, through meditation,” Sister Jayanti from Brahma Kumaris told RTCC.

“Right from the process of having the seed in your hand, through plantation and care so that he seeds come to germination and further to be able to harvest, the whole process is through the power of meditation – individually but also families and communities both separately from the field but also at the field itself.”

Placed in a meditation centre, the seeds are treated with thoughts of peace, non-violence, love, strength and resilience for up to a month before sowing.

Meditations are then conducted remotely and in the fields during each phase of the crop growth cycle.

Another aim for Brahma Kumaris is to build farmers’ self-esteem and limit suicides – something they say has become a widespread problem in India.

Growing message

While the concept of Yogic farming was born in India, it has now spread to European countries – including Italy.

Piero Musini is an Italian farmer who has applied Yogic principles on his small farm near Perugia.

He stresses that it is not a short-term commitment. In order to fully benefit from these techniques you need to give the land time to recover from fertilizers and nitrates – only then can it start to deliver.

VIDEO: Piero Musini on how Yogic farming has worked in Italy

“Yoga means connection. So really it means what you do with your thinking possibilities,” he explains.

“It takes a process of several years for the soil to regenerate itself [following conventional farming]… But after the few years, there is no different between this and the conventional farming system.”

“Of course you need a good farmer who knows what he is doing, because you have to alternative the products, or seed into the soil things which will give the nitrogen the things which you give chemically but in a natural way.”

But the key question is – can you measure the benefits in a quantifiable way?

A five-year study taking place in India aims to measure these benefits of Yogic Farming.

Working with 400 farmers, it aims to measure both the qualitative and the quantitative benefits of the system. With a year left on the study, the Brahmas Kumaris claim the results are positive.

“What they have found already is that the crop that comes from this particular method of yogic agriculture, the tomatoes for example has a higher vitamin C content, the wheat has a higher protein content,” explains Sister Jayanti. “So these are measurables that nobody can deny.”

VIDEO: Sister Jayanti from Brahma Kumaris on the potential of Yogic Farming

The post Yogic farming: Hippy culture or the answer to global famine and land degradation? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The aim is to demonstrate how Sustainable Development is becoming a reality on every continent, country and city.

Here Tamasin Ramsey explains how the practice of ‘Yogic farming’ has been reaping rewards in India.

The thought-child of the Rural Wing of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University (BKWSU) in India, Sustainable Yogic Agriculture is a unique form of farming that combines thought-based meditative practices with methods of organic agriculture and is bringing clear economic and social benefits to smallholder agrarian communities in India.

For more than 75 years, the BKWSU has been teaching methods of personal empowerment based on techniques of Raja Yoga meditation.

Yogic farming combines thought-based meditative practices with methods od organic agriculture

These methods include understanding the self as a soul, managing the energy of the mind, becoming cognizant of the relationship between thoughts and behaviour, maintaining a thought-union with the Divine and experiencing transcendental states that fill the mind and character with strength.

The BKWSU continually seeks ways in which to apply the benefits of spiritual practice in a way that responds meaningfully to people’s lives and daily circumstances.

It is now widely acknowledged that to sustain agricultural production, healthy environments, and viable farming communities there must be a whole-systems approach to agriculture incorporating traditional knowledge and organic agriculture that links ecology, culture, economics and society.

Sustainable Yogic Agriculture utilises a systems-wide approach, recognising all elements of farming: humans, animals and bird, flying and crawling insects, micro-organisms, seed, vegetation and surrounding ecosystems, and the natural elements of sun, soil, air, water and space.

These methods are engaging more than 400 farmers in India with the cooperative of scientists from India’s leading agricultural universities, G.B. (Gindh Ballabh) Pant University of Agriculture and Technology and S.D. (Sadarkrushinagar Dantiwada) Agricultural University.

Early data indicate statistically significant effects on crop quality and crop yield. Further, meditative practices designed for each phase of the agrarian cycle, from seed to harvest, are increasing farmers’ self-esteem and so reducing the frequency of farmer suicides and social violence in families and villages.

Qualitative and quantitative data gathered so far, using laboratory based experiments and participant observation, have provided valuable baseline information that endorse the importance of continued research.

The BKWSU say the process is reaping both economic and social benefits for communities in India

Research Methods and Data

The experimental land is divided into three parcels: OFM-1 (organic farming techniques), OFM-2 (organic farming techniques + meditation), and CIM (standard chemical farming using fertilizers and pesticides).

Quantitative

Preliminary findings indicate that OFM-2 (organic + meditation) has the greatest soil microbial population, the seeds germinate up to a week earlier. Subsequent crops reveal higher amounts of iron, energy, protein and vitamins compared to OFM-1(organic) and CIM (chemical).

Local farmers determined that the yogic process saves a total of Rs. 14769.00 ($USD 330) per acre as compared to chemical farming, offering low-cost high-benefit methods for local communities.

Yogic Methods

Seeds are placed in the BKWSU meditation centre where practised meditators focus thoughts of peace, non-violence, love, strength and resilience on the seeds for up to a month before sowing.

Regular meditations are conducted remotely and in the fields with specific thought practices designed to support each phase of the crop growth cycle, from empowering seeds and seed germination, through sowing, irrigation and growth, to harvest and soil replenishment.

Benefits for Business

Our goal is to create a more resilient society and a greener economy, while supporting sustainable agrarian practices and strengthening vulnerable communities.

In light of this, we offer opportunities for businesses to:

– Support further independent research into Sustainable Yogic Agriculture.
– Disseminate the principles and methods of Sustainable Yogic Agriculture to new audiences.
– Support the production of organic seed and organic agricultural practices.
– Dialogue with us to consider ways this study may be adapted and replicated, to bring benefit to more communities around the world.

In the last few years, businesses that support green, sustainable, and ethical endeavours have garnered significant public interest and support, yet many local and indigenous innovations still such as this remain un-mapped.

We invite businesses to work with us to ensure that this important study finds a place in global conversations.

Tours within the participating farming communities and research universities in India can be arranged.

Dr Tamasin Ramsay is an environmentalist and anthropologist, and researches the interrelationship between consciousness, human activity and the physical world. Tamasin is NGO Representative of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University to the United Nations and resides in New York.     

This article is part of a series commissioned by the Rio Conventions for their RioPlus Business project.

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