UN report: The world’s farms stretched to ‘a breaking point’

February 6, 2022 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels*

The world’s climate-stressed and pollution-degraded farming and agricultural system must shift quickly to sustainable practices to feed an additional 2 billion mouths expected by 2050, a new United Nations report finds.

By Dana Nuccitelli, Yale Climate Connections (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5)

Almost 10% of the 8 billion people on earth are already undernourished with 3 billion lacking healthy diets, and the land and water resources farmers rely on stressed to “a breaking point.” And by 2050 there will be 2 billion more mouths to feed, warns a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

For now, farmers have been able to boost agricultural productivity by irrigating more land and applying heavier doses of fertilizer and pesticides. But the report says these practices are not sustainable: They have eroded and degraded soil while polluting and depleting water supplies and shrinking the world’s forests. The FAO report discusses some important climate change impacts, such as changing distribution of rainfall, the suitability of land for certain crops, the spread of insects and other pests, and shorter growing seasons in regions affected by more intense droughts. While not the sole source of obstacles facing global agriculture, the report makes clear that climate change is further stressing agricultural systems and amplifying global food production challenges.

The report also offers hope that the problems are solvable: Water degradation can be reversed by turning to smart planning and coordination of sustainable farming practices and by deploying new innovative technologies. More sustainable agriculture can also help fight climate change: For instance, the report notes that wiser use of soils can help sequester some of the greenhouse gasses currently emitted by agricultural activities.

Drastic changes in climate will require regions to adjust the crops they grow. For example, the report predicts that much cereal production will probably have to move north, to Canada and northern Eurasia. Brazil and northern Africa may have a harder time growing coffee, but it may get easier in eastern Africa. A changing climate “may bring opportunities for multiple rainfed cropping, particularly in the tropics and subtropics.” And for areas “where the climate becomes marginal for current staple and niche crops, there are alternative annual and perennial tree crops, livestock, and soil and water management options available.”

The report recommends seed and germoplasm exchanges globally and among regions, and investments to develop crops that can withstand changes in temperature, salinity, wind, and evaporation.

The changes will not be easy, the report says, but they may be necessary to avoid widespread hunger and other catastrophes.

Extensive land and water degradation

Over the past 20 years, the global population has risen by more than 25% from just over 6 billion to nearly 8 billion people. The amount of land used to grow crops has increased by just 4% over that time, as farmers have been able to meet the growing demand for food by dramatically increasing the productivity per acre of agricultural land. They’ve done so, for example, by increasing use of diesel-fueled machinery, fertilizer, and pesticides.

But these practices have come at a price. “Human-induced degradation affects 34 percent (1,660 million hectares) of agricultural land,” the FAO reports. “The treatment of soils with inorganic fertilizers to increase or sustain yields has had significant adverse effects on soil health, and has contributed to freshwater pollution induced by run-off and drainage.”

This degradation is especially extensive on irrigated farmland. Irrigation has been critical for meeting food demand because it produces two to three times as much food per acre as does rain-fed farmland. But irrigation also increases runoff of fertilizers and pesticides that can contaminate soil and groundwater.

The FAO reports also that globally, agriculture accounts for 72% of all surface and groundwater withdrawals, mainly for irrigation, which is depleting groundwater aquifers in many regions. Global groundwater withdrawals for irrigated agriculture increased by about 20% over the past decade alone.

Similarly, the quality of 13% of global soil, including 34% of agricultural land, has been degraded. This degradation has been caused by factors such as excessive fertilizer use, livestock overgrazing causing soil compaction and erosion, deforestation, and decreasing water availability.

Deforestation trends offer one relatively bright spot in the FAO report. The global forested area has declined by about 1% (47 million hectares) over the past decade, but that is a significant improvement from the nearly 2% decline (78 million hectares) in the 1990s. And in the November 2021 international climate negotiations in Glasgow, 141 countries, covering 91% of global forested area, agreed to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030. It remains to be seen, of course, how many reach those commitments.

Climate change is worsening food system breakdowns

Climate change exacerbates farmers’ challenges by making weather more extreme and less reliable. Extreme heat can stress crops and farm workers while increasing evaporation of water from soil and transpiration from plants, thus amplifying agricultural water demands. Here too, it’s not all bad news: Agricultural productivity is expected to increase in regions that are currently relatively cold, but decrease in places that are hotter and drier, especially as climate change exacerbates droughts.

As with others, farmers will need to adapt to the changing climate, and making those adaptations can be expensive. For example, as the primary or sole producer of many of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts, California effectively acts as America’s garden. But climate change is exacerbating droughts and water shortages in the state, and farmers are struggling to adapt. About 80% of all almonds in the world are grown in California, generating $6 billion in annual revenue, but almonds are a very water-intensive crop. As a result, some farmers have been forced to tear up their lucrative almond orchards. It’s a stark reminder that “adaptation” can sound easy on paper, but in practice can sometimes be painful and costly.

Farmers and planners will need to adapt

Adaptation will nevertheless be necessary in the face of an anticipated 50% increase in food demand by 2050 (including a doubling in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa), extensive land and water quality degradation, and a changing climate. The FAO report recommends four action areas to continue to meet rising global food demand.

First, adopting inclusive land and water governance through improved land-use planning to guide land and water allocation and promote sustainable resources management.
Second, implementing integrated solutions at scale, for example by helping farmers use available resources more efficiently while minimizing the associated adverse environmental impacts and also building resilience to climate change.
Third, embracing innovative technologies and management like remote sensing services; opening access to data and information on crops, natural resources and climatic conditions; and improving rainwater capture and increasing soil moisture retention.
Fourth, investing in long-term sustainable land, soil, and water management; in restoring degraded ecosystems; and in data and information management for farmers.

Fortunately, sustainable agricultural practices can also do double duty as climate solutions. The FAO reports that 31% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agri-food systems. Sustainable farming practices like regenerative agriculture can require less diesel-fueled machinery and less reliance on soil- and water-polluting pesticides while increasing the carbon stored in farmed soils.

Solving these multiple problems will require planning and coordination, the FAO writes in the report, and “data collection needs to improve.” Again, a bright side: The technology to improve data collection already exists, and advances in agricultural research have also put other solutions within reach. What is needed now is for policymakers and planners to coordinate work with farmers to adopt more sustainable practices and adapt more quickly to the changing climate. So, while the food system is currently at a “breaking point,” these more sustainable solutions are all within reach.

E.O. Wilson’s lifelong passion for ants and conserving the World’s biodiversity

January 2, 2022 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*E.O. Wilson in February 2003. Source: Jim Harrison, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons*

Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.

By Doug Tallamy, The Conversation (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I met Edward O. Wilson in 1982, he had already made at least five such contributions to science.

Wilson, who died Dec. 26, 2021 at the age of 92, discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate. He worked out the importance of habitat size and position within the landscape in sustaining animal populations. And he was the first to understand the evolutionary basis of both animal and human societies.

Each of his seminal contributions fundamentally changed the way scientists approached these disciplines, and explained why E.O.—as he was fondly known—was an academic god for many young scientists like me. This astonishing record of achievement may have been due to his phenomenal ability to piece together new ideas using information garnered from disparate fields of study.

Big insights from small subjects

In 1982 I cautiously sat down next to the great man during a break at a small conference on social insects. He turned, extended his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.” Then we talked until it was time to get back to business.

Three hours later I approached him again, this time without trepidation because surely now we were the best of friends. He turned, extended his hand, and said “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Wilson forgetting me, but remaining kind and interested anyway, showed that beneath his many layers of brilliance was a real person and a compassionate one. I was fresh out of graduate school, and doubt that another person at that conference knew less than I — something I’m sure Wilson discovered as soon as I opened my mouth. Yet he didn’t hesitate to extend himself to me, not once but twice.

Thirty-two years later, in 2014, we met again. I had been invited to speak in a ceremony honoring his receipt of the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science. The award honored Wilson’s lifetime achievements in science, but particularly his many efforts to save life on Earth.

My work studying native plants and insects, and how crucial they are to food webs, was inspired by Wilson’s eloquent descriptions of biodiversity and how the myriad interactions among species create the conditions that enable the very existence of such species.

I spent the first decades of my career studying the evolution of insect parental care, and Wilson’s early writings provided a number of testable hypotheses that guided that research. But his 1992 book, “The Diversity of Life,” resonated deeply with me and became the basis for an eventual turn in my career path.

Though I am an entomologist, I did not realize that insects were “the little things that run the world” until Wilson explained why this is so in 1987. Like nearly all scientists and nonscientists alike, my understanding of how biodiversity sustains humans was embarrassingly cursory. Fortunately, Wilson opened our eyes.

Throughout his career Wilson flatly rejected the notion held by many scholars that natural history—the study of the natural world through observation rather than experimentation—was unimportant. He proudly labeled himself a naturalist, and communicated the urgent need to study and preserve the natural world. Decades before it was in vogue, he recognized that our refusal to acknowledge the Earth’s limits, coupled with the unsustainability of perpetual economic growth, had set humans well on their way to ecological oblivion.

Wilson understood that humans’ reckless treatment of the ecosystems that support us was not only a recipe for our own demise. It was forcing the biodiversity he so cherished into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first one caused by an animal: us.

*Upper Guinean Forest change from 1975 to 2013. Source: USGS.*

E.O. Wilson long advocated conserving the world’s biodiversity hot spots—zones with high numbers of native species where habitats are most endangered. This image shows deforestation from 1975 to 2013 in one such area, West Africa’s Upper Guinean Forest. USGS

A broad vision for conservation

And so, to his lifelong fascination with ants, E. O. Wilson added a second passion: guiding humanity toward a more sustainable existence. To do that, he knew he had to reach beyond the towers of academia and write for the public, and that one book would not suffice. Learning requires repeated exposure, and that is what Wilson delivered in “The Diversity of Life,” “Biophilia,” “The Future of Life,” “The Creation” and his final plea in 2016, “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”

As Wilson aged, desperation and urgency replaced political correctness in his writings. He boldly exposed ecological destruction caused by fundamentalist religions and unrestricted population growth, and challenged the central dogma of conservation biology, demonstrating that conservation could not succeed if restricted to tiny, isolated habitat patches.

“Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.”
—Edward O. Wilson

In “Half Earth,” he distilled a lifetime of ecological knowledge into one simple tenet: Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.

But is this possible? Nearly half of the planet is used for some form of agriculture, and 7.9 billion people and their vast network of infrastructure occupy the other half.

As I see it, the only way to realize E.O.’s lifelong wish is learn to coexist with nature, in the same place, at the same time. It is essential to bury forever the notion that humans are here and nature is someplace else. Providing a blueprint for this radical cultural transformation has been my goal for the last 20 years, and I am honored that it melds with E.O. Wilson’s dream.

There is no time to waste in this effort. Wilson himself once said, “Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.” Whether humans have the wisdom to meet that deadline remains to be seen.

Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 103 research publications and has taught insect related courses for 40 years.

Finding the sweet spot: How to scale up and finance ecosystem-based adaptation

November 28, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Banjul, The Gambia. Used under Creative Commons license. Photo credit: Roel van Deursen.*

By Julie Mollins, Forests News (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Protecting and restoring landscapes and building sustainable agroforestry systems is a powerful way to boost resilience to climate change and extreme weather events while supporting billions of livelihoods.

Incorporated into the international framework on climate change in 2011 at COP17, adaptation became a specific area of focus at the U.N. COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, where a work program was established to define specific global goals pertaining to it.

At the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), scientists are working on developing robust ecosystem-based adaptation strategies.

They must be part of broad, systems-wide approaches integrated into economic, political and social strategies, said Patrick Worms, senior science policy advisor at CIFOR-ICRAF, who led a side event discussion at COP26.

“The solution is thus not rocket science, but something much harder: the ability of our institutional systems to work across silos to jointly manage this fragile planet of ours.”
—Patrick Worms, senior science policy advisor at CIFOR-ICRAF

“We need to embed ecosystem adaptation – just like we need to embed mitigation – in the way the economy works, in the way government works, in the way that everything works, as we try to arrest carbon buildup, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss,” Worms said.

Lalisa Duguma, a scientist in the CIFOR-ICRAF Sustainable Landscapes and Integrated Climate Actions team, is working on a large-scale ecosystem-based adaptation project, funded by the multi-billion-dollar Green Climate Fund (GCF) which aims to promote the climate-resilience of rural communities in Gambia.

One difficulty working in African countries is that data on climate is scarce and inconsistent, which makes it a challenge to determine the extent of interventions required.

“Most is based on global data sets downscaled to the local context, but in this downscaling process, a lot of contextual realities are missing, which could inform the design process much better,” Duguma said.

Other challenges involve a lack of human resources and institutional capacity to implement adaptation actions, resource mismatches and how to measure the impact of interventions.

“In most ongoing adaptation actions, there is no clear strategy for scaling up – how scaling should go forward,” he said.

To address some of the challenges around capacity and infrastructure in Gambia, a baseline for tree cover was established, leading to investments into nine central nurseries and 100 million seedlings a year, said Malanding Jaiteh, who manages the $20 million, six-year forest restoration project on behalf of the country’s Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Natural Resources.

Another challenge is livestock grazing which can compromise restoration efforts, making it difficult to plan and establish. Grazing is free range in Gambia, and even takes on an international dimension as nomadic herders at times enter the country from Senegal.

“Transmigration presents serious challenges, especially to our newly established seedlings or newly established planting areas — farmers may be planting in the agricultural lands, but as soon as they are gone, or two years later, you know, some other population can come in and start destroying them,” Jaiteh said.

Fires are also damaging and demand a lot of resources, requiring a long term fire management system, he said.

In India’s state of Maharashtra, where monocropping of cotton and sugarcane have left farmers vulnerable to climate change, a multi-jurisdictional and multi-sectoral approach is proving effective, said Arjuna Srinidhi, associate thematic lead of climate change adaptation at the Watershed Organization Trust.

More than 80 percent of the state consists of rainfed drylands, where drought frequency has increased sevenfold over the past 50 years, Srinidhi said. Flooding is also a problem and due to erratic weather, adding to the vulnerability of farmers. Over 40 percent of the land is degraded, and groundwater levels are falling rapidly by 1 to 2 meters every year. More than three quarters of the farmers are smallholders with less than 2 hectares of land, so their adaptive capacities are limited, he said.

Mainstreaming ecosystem-based adaptation strategies into government policies and programs is key, but we also learned that watershed development was vital.

“This collaborative process resulted in an evidence-based and demand-driven roadmap for upscaling,” Srinidhi said. “There were several lessons that we learned over the past couple of years, the unanimous acceptance of a roadmap from diverse stakeholders — generating a buy-in from early stages of the project was crucial.”

Serah Kiragu-Wissler, a research associate at TMG Think Tank for Sustainability, observed that capacity-building and extension services are essential. Farmers she worked with said they need ongoing support for adaptation efforts. Land tenure rights are also critical for soil protection, Kiragu-Wissler said, citing examples from Burkina Faso and Kenya.

“Farmers cannot develop much interest in protecting soils if they have no security to the tenure to the land that they are working on,” she said. “They clear their land this season they plant and next season they are not actually there. So, what will motivate them to carry loads of manure from the village to the fields if they cannot be assured that it will be there for you know, two, three, four seasons?”

By implementing a community-led institution for managing how land is used, guidelines were introduced which helped secure access to land for women and youth. Now recognized by the local government, this approach is under consideration by other jurisdictions, she said.

Finding finance

Ensuring adequate financing for ecosystem-based adaptation projects is also a challenge, particularly due to its innovative aspects and the fact that so many proposals are unproven.

“Banks, investors and insurance need to make better decisions by assessing the impacts and dependencies on nature and materiality around climate risks,” said Namita Vikas, managing director of auctusESG, a Mumbai-based financial advisory firm. “By deploying capital goods, and surveys, given the effectiveness of such solutions. Adaptation, finance is about going beyond business as usual and incorporating the possible effects of climate change into the design of an activity.”

Andreas Reumann, who works for the GCF, which was established under U.N. climate talks to help poor countries pursue clean growth and adapt to global warming, is a specialist in designing monitoring systems that measure for outcomes.

The fund conducted a global evidence review on adaptation and forest activities with partners, which helped reveal gaps in understanding what works in a specific context.

From there, a two-dimensional matrix was created, which illustrated an imbalance regarding the geographical distribution of information. It also highlighted the question of enabling environments – and how to engage the policy arena, which is a subject that has not yet been researched, Reumann said.

“We as evaluators are thinking about and addressing these issues,” he added. “It requires more knowledge sharing, stronger evidence, and more collaboration on the ground to truly understand what matters.”

Creating data sets has proven to be effective, said Nitin Pandit, director of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment. By identifying 13 million hectares of land, with 100 million households, just outside the protected areas in peninsular India, and working with partners, accumulated data are supplied to financiers.

“So, they know that there is an upside in this because there is a scale that we are already planning in from day one,” Pandit said, sharing an image of large-scale elephants, which are made by artisans from lantana wood, an invasive species. Sold at a high price, the elephants were displayed outside Queen Elizabeth’s Buckingham Palace in London.

“The type of value addition that we can do by using the resources available must add an incentive for people to actually be engaged in adaptation, and therefore demand the kind of finance that is needed to support that kind of work,” he said.

For adaptation initiatives to be effective, it is vital to build dialogue processes and co-generate of the evidence base with government ministries, said Jessica Troni, senior programme officer responsible for the U.N. Environment Programme – Global Environment Facility Climate Change Adaptation portfolio. Budgets and systems thinking must be incorporated to determine how project targets can be mainstreamed into national development plans.

“Mainstreaming has to mean that every single chapter in your national development plan is geared towards building resilience to adaptation – you can then create budgets support for mechanisms that are able to absorb larger investment flows,” Troni said.

Promises to increase the coffers for adaptation ambitions were made at COP26 in an effort catch up with a shortfall in the $100 billion a year by 2020 pledged at COP17 amid efforts to avert, minimize and address loss and damage already occurring from climate change.

“The beautiful thing is that it’s extraordinarily hard to do land-based mitigation without, at the same time, boosting that land’s ability to adapt to climate change, its biodiversity or its ability to provide a range of nutritious foods and other products,” Worms said.

“The solution is thus not rocket science, but something much harder: the ability of our institutional systems to work across silos to jointly manage this fragile planet of ours.”