If you are among the old school Valentines who appreciate a good box of chocolates and a fine cabernet, you’ll be heartbroken to learn that these romantic treats may be much harder to come by in the future because of climate change.
Droughts and rising temperatures pose great risks to agricultural productivity across the globe, from California’s Napa Valley to West Africa’s cocoa fields.
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Wacky weather isn’t just a fluke. According to the National Climate Assessment (NCA), extreme weather events are becoming more common and are likely to increase in the future, which poses challenges for farmers and communities.
Traditional ways of responding to weather crises, such as building higher flood walls and digging deeper wells are expensive and often fail.
The good news is that farmers are increasingly turning to more natural solutions and practices, often referred to as “green infrastructure,” that use nature to reduce the impacts of both floods and droughts.
Green infrastructure is also needed to reduce fertilizer pollution and restore the Gulf of Mexico dead zone to safe levels, as a new study published today in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) reports.
2014 was a milestone year for sustainable agriculture across the United States and around the world. In the U.S., we saw food companies and agribusiness like United Suppliers step up to the plate to meet Walmart’s new demand for sustainable grains, and EDF’s launch of the new Sustainable Sourcing Initiative. We also saw the launch of the United Nations’ Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture, which aims to enable 500 million farmers worldwide to practice sustainable farming.
On the Colorado River, countless stakeholders including U.S. and Mexican policymakers, conservation organizations and farmers came together to orchestrate and witness the Colorado River Delta pulse flow – the temporary release of water across the United States-Mexico border that brought relief and restoration to the dry, empty river delta ecosystem – an historic accomplishment for people and the environment.
Rebecca Shaw participated in the first working meeting of the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture on December 17 and 18 in Rome.
The President’s Climate Data Initiative launched earlier this year to bring vast amounts of government data together in one place for communities and businesses to use when making decisions in the face of climate change. Last week, the Department of Interior and other executive branch offices released more data specific to water and ecosystems, as well as new geospatial tools, that will help natural resource managers – including farmers – better prepare for the future.
The newly released data sets include critical information about stream flow, soil, land cover and biodiversity, and are complemented by tools that will enable users to visualize and overlay data sets related to ecosystems, land use, water and wildlife. Together, the new data and tools will help farmers build resilience to the impacts of changing weather. Read More
Future fertilizer pill would detect signals from plant roots to reduce nutrient losses. Photo credit: Liz Bokt
Can a little pill solve the problem of fertilizer waste? It sounds futuristic, but it could become a reality in the next 10 years, according to recent article on AgWeb.com.
The article highlighted new developments in nanotechnology aimed at creating a “fertilizer pill” that could detect chemical signals from plant roots and release nitrogen according to those signals. The pill would allow for nitrogen to be released on an as needed basis, thereby reducing fertilizer waste byproducts that are harmful to the environment.
Although fertilizer has undeniable benefits for crop yields, excess fertilizer that runs off into our waterways is damaging to rivers, oceans and the climate.
Improving the soil helps ranchers and the climate. © rui vale sousa / Shutterstock Images.
Rangeland ecosystems cover approximately one third of the land area in the United States and half the land area of California. What if that vast domain could be utilized to combat climate change, and ranchers could get paid for land management practices that keep more carbon in the soil and enhance production?
That’s the direction we’re going, thanks to a new carbon accounting standard approved today by the American Carbon Registry. The new protocol allows ranchers who reduce their greenhouse gas footprint by applying compost to their fields to earn credits that can be traded on the voluntary carbon market.
Climate benefits
The standard is supported by research conducted by the Silver Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, which shows that applying a half inch of compost to rangeland soils removes greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at the rate of half a ton per acre each year.
You may have heard by now about “climate-smart agriculture.” It’s the catchphrase that came out of the United Nations Climate Summit this week and the reason I was in New York to participate in a panel discussion on how to achieve food security for a growing population in a climate-changing world.
More than 20 governments and 30 organizations announced they would join the newly launched Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture, which aims to enable 500 million farmers worldwide to practice climate-smart agriculture. This is wonderful. But what does it mean in practice?
My colleagues and I have been asking ourselves this question since the concept was originally introduced by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in 2010. Over the past four years, we’ve done some hard thinking on which practices, precisely, will get us to a point where we can keep pace with the food demands of a growing global population and increase the resiliency of our food systems to the harsh impacts of climate change.
Rebecca Shaw is an expert panelist at the 2014 Society of Environmental Journalists conference in New Orleans, talking about “Feeding Eight Billion People in a Warming World.”
You may have seen the recent news about the potential impacts of drought on craft breweries like Lagunitas. Or the articulate Mother Jones headline – Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters. Talking about climate change in terms of beer and almond milk isn’t a bad strategy for capturing the attention of thirsty Americans, but it’s not just our favorite beverages that are at risk.
Climate change poses a number of potential threats to the global food system, namely because of the impacts to agriculture. Here are five reasons why everyone from beer drinkers in California to bean farmers in Latin America should care about climate change and agriculture.
1. Rising temperatures could burn a hole in your wallet. The 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report found that, with average temperature increases of 3 to 4ºC, we will see large negative impacts on farm yields and severe risks to food security. Not only are food markets sensitive to climate extremes, but food prices are expected to rise anywhere from 3 to 84 percent by 2050.
Economists estimate that Texas’ continuing drought has cost farmers up to $8 billion so far. [ScottOlsson/Getty]
The report released this week by a group of prominent and politically diverse business leaders and public officials stood out, in part, because of the alarming losses it forecasts for America’s agricultural industry.
This matters to all of us, because commodity agriculture is big business in the United States, putting food on our plates every single day.
