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Leanne Zeppenfeldt, Knowledge & Partnerships Officer and Bruce Campbell, Chief Innovation Strategist at Clim-Eat discuss how Earth Overshoot Day highlights the need to not only mitigate climate change but adapt to its effects.
By July 28th – Earth Overshoot Day – humans will have used more ecological resources and services this year than what our planet can regenerate.
The rate at which we are emitting greenhouse gases and using our clean water, healthy soil, oil reserves, and carbon-storing forests exceeds the Earth’s capacity. Despite the important role it plays to our lives and livelihoods, agriculture is also one of the largest drivers of planetary overshoot, and mitigation action to reduce our natural resource use and emissions is essential to #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day in the coming years. Continue reading →
The World Congress on Conservation Agriculture will demonstrate that Conservation Agriculture is the best tool to mitigate climate change and to adapt to the effects of climate change, contributing to food security, promoting resilience and biodiversity and, with this, helping to save the planet. The 7WCCA will bring together farmers, policy makers, scientists and educationalist from all around the world, along with financing representatives, risk brokers and others stakeholders to identify the best solutions for all regions. Read more >>
This week, amidst the ongoing UN climate talks in Doha, farmers, scientists, businesses and NGOs will unite at Agriculture, Landscapes and Livelihoods Day (ALL-5) to share solutions for protecting our food supply and the livelihoods of farmers across the globe in the face of climate change.
To illustrate the hugely important role that agriculture plays in both the adaptation and mitigation of climate change, a brand new infographic produced by Farming First, in partnership with the CGIARResearch Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCFAS), has been launched. Entitled ‘The Story of Agriculture and Climate Change: The Road We’ve Travelled’, it highlights significant events leading up to discussions on the future of agriculture at COP18, including the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first discussions of the impacts of climate change on agriculture in IPCCstudies in 2001, the initiation of REDD in 2005 and the first ever agriculture day in 2009.
UNFCCC to consider agriculture issues under SBSTA
This important road, however, is not yet at an end. In Durban in 2011, the UNFCCC agreed to consider issues relating to agriculture, under the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA). This would mandate SBSTA to research, document and share knowledge of improved agricultural practices to inform decision-making around agriculture and climate change to stakeholders, as they prepare national strategies to address climate change.
Nineteen of the of the world’s leading agricultural organisations, including the World Farmers organisation (WFO), the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and CGIAR Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres, have issued a joint call-to-action to urge negotiators to approve this SBSTA programme.
Farmers around the world are experiencing the impacts of climate change today. Productivity is shifting due to changing and more volatile weather conditions and temperatures. By 2050, if farmers are not assisted to meet these changes, agriculture yields will decrease with impacts projected to be the most severe in Africa and South Asia, with productivity decreasing by 15% and 18% respectively. We urgently need to safeguard our food supply and to ensure continued growth in economies where agriculture is an important sector.
Part of the climate change solution
In addition, while prioritizing the adaptation challenges, we should not overlook agriculture’s significance as part of the solution to climate change. Agriculture and land use change (primarily from deforestation) contribute an estimated 31% of total greenhouse gas emissions, yet improvements to crop yields to date already have saved 34% of total emissions. Every dollar ($1 USD) invested in agriculture results in 68kgC fewer emissions.
The road agriculture has travelled at the climate talks is long, but we need to ensure it reaches the destination that millions of farmers desperately need.
We need to make 2012 the year that a cohesive, holistic approach to agriculture is put on the UNFCCC’s road map.
About the Author: Anette Friis, from the Danish Food & Agriculture Council, is the spokesperson for Farming First.
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A recent Reuters article listed ten climate change adaptation technologies that can help the world’s farmers meet food demands within more extreme weather conditions:
1. Innovations around infectious diseases. Hotter global temperatures will lead to the spread of more infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue, tick-borne encephalitis, and Lyme disease, according to the UNFCCC. Most of this will happen in regions that are tropical and close to tropical geographies. Higher temperatures will also lead to increases of food-born diseases like Salmonella in more developed regions. Innovations in drug delivering, drugs themselves, and prevention will be needed.
2. Flood safeguards. Building owners and farmers in vulnerable regions will increasingly look to technologies that can help them adapt to potential floods. Those could include building homes on stilts, to crafting barriers around rivers in populated regions, and using seeds and crops that are more resistant to floods.
3. Weather forecasting technologies. Extreme weather conditions, from massive floods to hurricanes, will become more common in certain regions because of the warming of the Earth. Weather forecasting has been an area of little innovation and will depend heavily on information technology tools (satellites, software, computing, sensors) to inject some much-needed innovation into the sector.
4. Insurance tools. To help spread the risk of extreme weather events and higher temperatures, farmers and governments in developing countries could invest in insurance programs that would pay out when poor conditions happen. Already, insurance companies in some areas are seeing more events around flooding due to climate change. In particular, look to insurance tools that came out of the Internet industry — like WeatherBill — to find solutions.
5. More resilient crops. High temperatures can cut annual crop productivity dramatically, can lead to droughts or more rainfall, and can lead to longer or shorter crop seasons. Farmers that grow crops on risk-prone lands will be looking for seeds that can withstand higher temperatures, more or less water, and fluctuating crop cycle times. Genetically modified crops could play a key role in this movement.
6. Supercomputing. Weather forecasting and climate change data will benefit immensely from more powerful and faster supercomputers that can crunch data and make important predictions in real time. Can exascale computing save us?
7. Water Purification. Harsher and more wide-spread droughts will lead to a strain on communities and farmers that need fresh water. At the same time, rising sea levels will affect coastal regions, potentially leading to an increase of salt in ground water. So-called desalination technology has seen an under-investment by the venture capitalist community, as VCs are unfamiliar with the markets for water technology.
8. Water Recycling. Beyond desalination, other water technologies include using gray water and harvesting rainwater, for crops and everyday human uses. The key to this type of technology is that it has to be cheap, cheap, cheap.
9. Efficient Irrigation Systems. While it’s not cutting edge technology, farmers in affected regions will be quick to embrace irrigation systems that are much more efficient than they currently use. Packaging a product attractive to this segment could be popular.
10. Sensors. With all the potential problems and fluctuations in the environment due to global warming, there will be a growth in the need for accurate environmental data, particularly from sensors. Whether these are located in the ocean, in the atmosphere, in soil, in flood zones or in arid drought-stricken lands, organizations, governments and companies will want to track the changes in order to develop solutions to deal with the problem.
