Natural Resources Necessary to Feed World Are at a ‘Breaking Point,’ Warns FAO

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain.”

By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A United Nations report released Thursday detailing humanity’s degradation of natural resources warns swift and sweeping reforms are needed to keep feeding the growing global population.

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point.”

The new U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report argues that “a sense of urgency needs to prevail over a hitherto neglected area of public policy and human welfare, that of caring for the long-term future of land, soil, and water.”

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils,” the publication explains, “is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain, guaranteeing nature-positive production, advancing equitable livelihoods, and building resilience to shocks and stresses arising from natural disasters and pandemics.”

Entitled The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture: Systems at breaking point (SOLAW 2021), the report declares that “time is of the essence.”

That tone is echoed by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in a foreword to the report, which he says provides “evidence of the changing and alarming trends in resource use.”

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point,” Qu writes. “It is clear our future food security will depend on safeguarding our land, soil, and water resources.”

Already, human-induced soil degradation affects 34% of land used for food while water scarcity threatens 3.2 billion people—nearly half the total human population—in agricultural areas, according to SOLAW 2021.

Alongside its broad warning that “the interconnected systems of land, soil, and water are stretched to the limit,” the report emphasizes that “current patterns of agricultural intensification are not proving sustainable,” and “farming systems are becoming polarized,” with an “increasing concentration of land under a relatively small number of large commercial farming enterprises.”

Recognizing the need to better manage and safeguard land and water resources essential for food production, the report offers four key takeaways:

  • Land and water governance has to be more inclusive and adaptive;
  • Integrated solutions need to be planned at all levels if they are to be taken to scale;
  • Technical and managerial innovation can be targeted to address priorities and accelerate transformation; and
  • Agricultural support and investment can be redirected towards social and environmental gains derived from land and water management.

“Current patterns of agrifood production are not proving sustainable,” Qu said Thursday at the report’s launch event. “Yet, agrifood systems can play a major role in alleviating these pressures and contributing positively to climate and development goals.”

In his foreword, Qu notes that “a meaningful engagement with the key stakeholders—farmers, pastoralists, foresters, and smallholders—directly involved in managing soils and conserving water in agricultural landscapes is central.”

“These are nature’s stewards and the best agents of change to adopt, adapt, and embrace the innovation we need to secure a sustainable future,” he adds.

Some of those same stakeholders have been critical of the U.N. agency in recent months.

A coalition of food justice advocates last week sent a letter to Qu calling on the FAO to cut ties with CropLife International, warning that any collaboration with the agrochemical trade association “undercuts your agency’s critical—and urgently needed—support for agroecology, which FAO itself notes ‘can support food production and food security and nutrition while restoring the ecosystem services and biodiversity that are essential for sustainable agriculture.'”

Earlier this year, the FAO leader’s remarks at the U.N. Food Systems Summit were among those flagged by justice campaigners as evidence that the September event was “paving the way for greater control of big corporations over global food systems and misleading the people through corporate-led false solutions.”

Just before the summit, during a counter-mobilization, Razan Zuayter of the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty had said that “food systems can be transformed through the respect of food sovereignty via the will of landless peasants, small farmers, and fishers.”

“We have shown that the people are hungry for real change,” Zuayter added, “and are willing to do whatever it takes to fight for and reclaim their land, their rights, and the future of food systems.”

Warning of Looming ‘List of Horrors,’ Pacific Island Leaders Demand Urgent COP 26 Climate Action

Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama stressed that world leaders should not be allowed to “sneak in and out of Glasgow without making a single serious commitment.”

Photo by Adli Wahid on Unsplash
Photo by Adli Wahid on Unsplash

By Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams (CC BY-ND 3.0).

As world leaders prepare to jet off to this month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland, the heads of several Pacific island nations in recent days urged world leaders to leave their good intentions at home and commit to urgent, meaningful climate action.

“We refuse to be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, as we are so often called.”

—Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama 

On Thursday, Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, Marshallese President David Kabua, and Samoan Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa addressed the European Union-Indo-Pacific Virtual Conference on Climate Change.

“For our sake and all of humanity’s, small island developing states will use the full measure of our moral authority against major emitters who refuse to arrive in Glasgow with strong commitments,” Bainimarama told the conference, according to Agence France-Presse.

Bainimarama lamented that low-lying Pacific island nations—which are among the least responsible for the climate emergency and but most adversely affected by it—stressed that the Glasgow summit, also known as COP 26, must not end in “a litany of good intentions.”

“The consequences of inaction are unthinkable,” he said. “The loss of entire islands, as well as vast stretches of coastline from Lagos to Venice to Miami, the coastal belt of Bangladesh. Mass climate-driven migration, wildfire seasons in arid regions that incinerate homes, farms, ecosystems, and an unimaginable loss of biodiversity—the list of horrors goes on.”

Earlier this week, Bainimarama angrily told a forum organized by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project that “we refuse to be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, as we are so often called.”

“We want more of ourselves than to be helpless songbirds whose demand serves as a warning to others,” he said, urging Pacific island nations to not allow world leaders to “sneak in and out of Glasgow without making a single serious commitment.”

According to The Syndey Morning Herald:

Bainimarama said Pacific Island nations will demand that… wealthier countries make good on the commitment they made during the Paris talks to extend to developing nations $100 billion in finance annually for climate adaptation and mitigation; and to commit to emission cuts that keep the 1.5°C warming target within reach.

“That is our expectation for every nation,” said Bainimarama. “Our actions will decide whether islands exist or are lost to the rising seas.”

Kabua said Thursday that “my country and this region needs the world to recognize that this cannot wait.”

“We face the most difficult questions—which islands to preserve, what happens when our people are forced to move against their will, how will we preserve our culture?” he said. “We need a signal from the rest of the world, particularly the large emitters, that our voices and our needs are being heard.”

Mata’afa told the E.U.-backed conference that “we are already experiencing intense and frequent tropical cyclones and droughts, increased heavy precipitation and floods, ocean warming, and acidification. The impacts are detrimental to our health, wellbeing, livelihoods, and way of life.”

Speaking late last month at the United Nations General Assembly, she stressed: “It is about action for survival, and we all need to shoulder our responsibilities and play our part. The big polluters and emitters need to demonstrate more commitment and leadership.”

“The upcoming COP in Glasgow is our point of no return,” she added. “Our commitments from there onwards will determine the future trajectory of our planet. Can we avoid a climate catastrophe in our children’s lifetime?”

How Curators Transferred Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks’ Archives to Escape Wildfires

sequoias
The sequoias that live on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California are the largest trees in the world by volume. Erin Donalson/EyeEm via Getty Images

By Emily Lin, Head of Digital Curation and Scholarship, University of California, Merced.

Editor’s note: As wildfires came dangerously close to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in September 2020, the curator of the archives there worked with Emily Lin, librarian and head of digital curation at the University of California Merced, to evacuate the archives to keep them safe. In this interview, Lin explains how they evacuated the records, what’s in them and why they’re worth preserving.

Listen to Emily Lin of UC Merced talk about the archives and see the contents of the park archives and photos from the evacuation.

Why were the archives of Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks evacuated?

Ward Eldredge, the curator of the archives of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and I had been talking about the potential partnership around digitization of collections that had been housed there for a couple of years now. There’s been a concern about the safety of these records because wildfires in the past few years have been an annual threat. So the long-term safekeeping of the records was very much on Eldredge’s mind. And he pointed out that the UC Merced campus is located in one of the few areas in California that are outside of a high-risk fire zone and also outside of the risk of earthquakes. There was just no question that we would do whatever we could to bring them here for safekeeping.

Alder Creek grove
The Castle Fire in October 2020 burned hundreds of Sequoias in the privately owned Alder Creek grove that NGO Save the Redwoods League purchased less than a year ago. Al Seib/LA Times via Getty Images

In September, when the fires got really close to the park, Eldredge was trying really hard to find a way to move the materials. He just couldn’t find a van or a truck because the residents in the area were also being called to evacuate, and there was a shortage. So in the course of a day, we managed to make arrangements to take our moving truck from campus, and he was able to secure a U-Haul truck. We were able to pack everything and move it out of the mountains to the UC Merced campus, which is two and a half hours away.

What’s in these archives?

There were hundreds of boxes of collections, about 600 linear feet, and also cabinets of plant specimens and artifacts.

It’s a complete record of the administrative history of the park. Sequoia was the second-oldest national park in the U.S., established in 1890. So there are records related to its founding and through to the 20th century. In letters written by the park directors to the U.S. president and the secretaries of the Department of the Interior, one can see how the thinking around managing public lands, conservation, fire and forest management changed over the last century.

Before the park was established, people would cut the sequoias down for timber. The city of Los Angeles wanted to build a dam in Kings Canyon up until 1965. So you can see how the thinking changed and how we got from that way of thinking to really establishing the National Park Service and protecting these unique environments.

Kings Canyon
Kings Canyon is a rugged glacier-carved valley more than a mile deep. Crd637 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

There’s an incredible photographic record – tens of thousands of photographs that cover pretty much every place within the park. There are maps of the sequoia groves, maps related to how trails and roads and other buildings were constructed. We take these trails for granted, but they were huge undertakings involving hundreds of workers breaking rocks, cutting trees and excavating for years. They worked through the winter sometimes to do it within schedule. These projects also provided jobs during the Great Depression.

Who will find them useful?

Anyone, from those within the parks who want to better understand the history of the park, to the rangers and the interpreters who want to provide and present that history to the general public. Ken Burns, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, accessed these records while he was making his television series about the national parks.

They’ll also be more widely available for students to use. There’s plenty of material in there for lots of Ph.D. students working on dissertations and for those who want to really investigate how best to manage public lands and determine what’s effective. That knowledge is going to benefit the broader public and help conserve these national parks for all of us. There’s a rich record that can help us understand what is unique about the environment that allows these trees to survive.

What are the plans for keeping the archives at UC Merced?

When the records were kept in the park, it was just one person, Ward Eldredge, maintaining the records. That’s a lot of work. You could make an appointment and he could provide access if you wanted to come to the park, but it’s in a very small space within the park headquarters, so the accessibility was definitely limited. Now that these collections are at the library at UC Merced, it will be easier for people to be able to access them.

Our vision is to be able to digitize much of this material. Once it’s online, it will be a lot easier for people to at least see and maybe answer some of their immediate questions. And if there’s a need for them to see the physical material, they can still make arrangements to do that.

There’s still a long way to go, because normally, we would have to make a plan with the National Park Service, raise funds, build the facilities to store them safely and so on. Because we had to evacuate them, we still have to work on formalizing an agreement, but our goal is eventually to make sure that these records will be safe.


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.