Bio-diversity of thinking key solution to multiple crises

The conventional wisdom sees Climate Change and population growth causing water scarcity, storm damage, sea-level rise leading to a lowering of average food harvests. More recently the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Global Food Crisis have been linked in so far as the financial resources are unavailable to address the scope of the food problem. In fact many are now discussing this multi-factorial nature of crises that are mounting up. In an article, by Tony Burke, “Food for thought as other crisis hits hard”, 19th Nov 2008, he states that, “The world is facing a challenge to produce more food, while combating climate change, which further exacerbates, water scarcity and a global financial crisis’.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization met in Rome to discuss these inter-locking crisis, whilst primarily concerned with food production, climate change was never far away from the discussions. Food prices in 2008 have risen worldwide and food riots have occurred in Africa and South-East Asia this year, and prices are predicted to worsen in years to come.

Lower agricultural production is not just an impact of Climate Change but current methods of food production are in fact the largest single source of Climate Change.

An excellent video with many facts on the use of fossil fuels in agriculture is called, “How Cuba Survived Peak Oil”- Power of Community. In Cuba agriculture, before 1990 consumed more oil than cars and houses in a ration of 10:9:7. Cuba has become a laboratory experiment when it faced in the early 1990s an artificial energy famine, an economic and energy crisis when the Soviet Union collapsed. During the Special Period 1989-1994, Cuban food imports collapsed by 80%. Oil imports dropped from 14 million to 4 million tons.   Cuba had no access to the World Bank or IMF. Faced with food scarcity, no imported oil, no electricity, no refrigeration, no air-conditioning and having to cook daily and pull water from ropes, the Cubans were forced to embark on survival agriculture. They have 2% of the population of Latin America, but 11% of scientists who took over Cuba’s agricultural systems. They developed urban gardens, sustainable agricultural practices and land redistribution. Before the special period Cuba was the most intensively farmed country in Central and Latin America and agriculture was set up for export markets based on plantation agriculture. Today Cuba is self-sufficient in food and 80 % of food grown is organic.The Cuban experience is a model of what needs to be done when confronted with multiple crises.

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Scientist, Allen Savory in his paper “A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change“ describes a holistic method of restoring grazing lands, arid lands and degraded lands using methods of animal husbandry that mimic nature and restore soil health, increase biodiversity and absorb carbon back into the soils. He says, soils are further degraded by industrial agriculture using pesticides and chemicals and modern methods of animal husbandry. Dr Savoury has founded holistic management as a movement.

Dr Allen Savoury has 50 years of scientific and practical experience with a network of farmers now representing 30 million acres worldwide using his holistic management techniques. Holistic management has been proven to work even in drought for over 23 years.

His work is very timely and needs to be explored as more focus on Agricultural Emissions as a contributor to GHG emissions is emerging. So far global projects under CDM/JI have not considered soil carbon and no methodologies have been approved. Most new proposed Emissions Trading schemes including Australia, and New Zealand do not include agricultural offsets, the exception is the proposed US Cap and Trade mooted for 2009. To pass the Senate support from rural American states will be necessary. Soil carbon credits may be the rural stimulus package that Clean Tech is for the cities’ utilities and transport infrastructure.

If the car industry spearheaded by GM has to reinvent itself so may the agricultural sector. Following close on the heels of Global Climate Change is a food crisis noted by UK Scientist Professor Lang and some like Scientist Dr Allen Savory believe these twin issues are linked and part of the same problem.

The first and current high technology path under the current Kyoto Protocol focuses on reducing GHG emissions from industry, utilities and transport by plant improvements, fuel switching from coal to gas or oil to bio-diesel and using alternative energy such as solar, wind, nuclear as examples. The high tech path is the focus of mainstream Scientists including the IPCC where the focus is on reducing fossil fuel emissions. It does not address the burning of the world’s grasslands, savannah and does not mention land degradation as a major source of carbon emissions leading to Climate Change.

Furthermore, Savoury maintains that low impact agriculture is the second path, to combating climate change and the only path that can deal with the existing build up of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.  Savoury also notes the limitations on carbon sequestration underground or in the oceans and as many others have noted in the long term carbon can be expected at some point to be released or cause ocean acidification.

Organic farming is often seen as the solution as it may not use chemical and pesticides but this does not mean it is a naturally managed system integrated with animals. The new agriculture will need to be truly holistic in that it mimics nature and restores soil health-keeping soils permanently covered. The cropping practices are more akin to nature’s poly-culture complexity than today’s single-crop fields that leave the soil bare between plants and rows and, in many cases, over the entire non-growing season.

Such a new agriculture will remove and store carbon from the atmosphere risk-free, while also increasing water retention. According to the United Nations, one-third of the earth’s land surface (10 billion acres/4 billion hectares) is threatened by desertification, the bulk of which is rangelands. And this estimate is conservative. Rangelands are similar to croplands in that if the soil is bare any time of the year, they will deteriorate and release carbon previously stored. At the same time the ability of such rangelands to store water is reduced. As so much of the soil in rangeland areas is bare - grasslands that appear healthy to anyone driving by in a vehicle commonly have 50% to 90% of the soil bare and exposed between plants - the erosion figures from them dwarf the dramatic figures recorded for croplands.

Soil Carbon farmer Tony Lovell and Bruce Ward  made a submission to the Garnaut Climate Chanage Review regarding Landuse, Agriculture and Forestry. They were suggesting that soil carbon be accepted as a source of carbon credits under Australia’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme. They maintain that using holistic management far more land is available to store carbon. Estimates are that forestry projects could absorb about 5% of Australian emissions, but the real opportunity for acting as major carbon sink is the 64% of landmass of rangelands, crop lands, that currently remain an unrecognised sink for carbon emissions.

Dr Savoury takes exception to the notion that large herbivores cattle, sheep and goats producers of methane are the problem, but indeed could be a major part of the solution. The generally accepted wisdom is that livestock overgrazing and trampling is responsible for a major part of the land degradation as well as methane emissions.

See Clean Living, this blog on Food Miles

Savoury noted, “An alternative to grassland burning and inevitable desertification as a young biologist/game ranger in Africa in the 1950s. Studying the damage from Government policy to burn Africa’s grasslands, he noticed the healthiest land was associated with remnant wild populations of large game animals, where large populations of thousands of buffalo and  game, complete with packs of lions that followed closely and kept the herds bunched, the soil and vegetation was healthiest. What the wild, large concentrated herds did not consume, they trampled onto the ground, thus removing the old growth and preparing both plants and soils for new growth.

The animals in intact communities were doing what we were doing using fire, but doing it better with no adverse effects of soil, wetlands, springs and rivers. The world’s vast savannas and grasslands developed over millions of years with soil, soil life, plants, grazing herbivores and their predators-all acting as one vast indivisible functioning whole in nature.

The world’s large grazing animals run in herds as a defence strategy against pack-hunting predators. The larger the number of animals, both prey and predator, the larger the herd masses. Such herding grazers have what are referred to as non-self-regulating populations. This means their numbers are only controlled by accident, disease or predation, rather than any innate breeding control. Because they cannot regulate their own numbers these populations were often enormous with numbers running to many millions.“

In fact, as we have discovered, only through increasing livestock numbers while planning their concentration and movement carefully can desertification be reversed on most rangelands. Once restored, rangelands can store even more carbon than croplands can for two reasons: the rangelands of the world dwarf the croplands in size; and most croplands support annual plants with lesser root volume and depth than the perennial plants of healthy rangelands. Root volume and depth is crucial to both carbon and water storage in soils.

The diaries of early explorers in Africa and the Americas record vast herds, which in all likelihood were but remnants of earlier much larger numbers. In the early 1800s, for instance, some 17,000 antelope were shot in a one-day hunt provided for the Prince of Wales in South Africa. Records kept by early South African pioneers describe substantial wetlands, sponges and springs associated with the vast herds but which dried up rapidly as soon as the herds were killed off and their former role was replaced with fire”.

If his approach to animal husbandry was adopted, we would not have to give up eating meat. Natural management practices following nature’s evolutionary herding methods, which co-evolved between plants and animals when millions of buffalo / bison / antelope ranged the American / African / middle-eastern rangelands are his solution. In fact he argues in times gone by far greater numbers of herbivores producing methane existed without causing Climate Change.

Using modern management techniques that truly mimic natural herding phenomena mean  carbon will be sequestered in soils. For the earth’s soils to once more sequester carbon as it once did - it is essential to restore living soils. Small increases in soil organic matter amount to billions of tons of carbon stored safely. Conversely, small decreases in soil organic matter result in vast amounts of carbon released to the atmosphere.

Restoring soil organic matter and soil structure also increases rates of water retention. Excessive soil exposure throughout most of the year leads to soil degradation and further exacerbated by industrial agricultural use of chemicals and pesticides.

The new agriculture is close to organic practices and more. It will have to allow natural systems to re-emerge with poly-culture complexity extending beyond plants to include animals particularly herbivores. This strategy has great appeal for Australia, Africa, Middle East and the US where large herbivores have ranged over grasslands.

Some Soil carbon scientists believe the entire legacy or carbon load could be absorbed in the world’s croplands if properly managed, which would mean the end of human-caused Climate Change as a problem. It is estimated that 24 billion tons of soil are eroded annually.

On the face of it, the New Zealand Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill passed on September 11 looks good. It is broader, covering more sectors than the first cut of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and UK Emissions Trading Scheme as it brings in early the transport and the utility sector under a regime that sets limits on the amount of greenhouse gases they can emit.

Planet Ark noted that, the New Zealand scheme is the “the first national cap-and-trade scheme outside of Europe”, joining 27 other nations that have adopted Climate Change bills. The bill was passed into law on a 63-57 vote in parliament, a relatively slim majority. Those that breach their limit will have to buy credits from users that produced emissions below their ceiling.

The New Zealand trading scheme phases in the less difficult sectors first across the economy such as emissions from forestry from 2008, transport by 2009, stationary energy such as coal-fired power stations by 2010 and agricultural waste by 2013.

The New Zealand emissions trading scheme will include liquid fossil fuels used in transportation beginning in 2011, and covers gasoline, diesel, aviation gasoline, jet kerosene, light fuel oil, and heavy fuel oil. Emissions from fuel used for international aviation and marine transport are exempted from the scheme, consistent with the Kyoto Protocol.

In Europe, the transport and power sector are where the big emissions are, whereas in New Zealand, the converse is true. About 60 percent of New Zealand’s power comes from hydro-electricity, while agricultural emissions, such as methane from livestock, comprise about 50% of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions, so this is no doubt why the agricultural sector is planned to be tackled last.  I am not up on the best ways to reduce methane emissions from livestock, but last time I looked at this sector, there were mostly plans afoot for flatulence pills in animals. Eating less meat did not seem like a likely solution as this would affect New Zealands exports. See the New Zealand government’s agricultural research efforts on agricultural emissions.

So paradoxically, transport is easier to do in New Zealand and the government is making a meal of this fact. It states the transportation sector accounts for 19.2% of New Zealand’s CO₂emissions. This sounds fantastic except this number needs to be looked at closely as there are 6 greenhouse gases that trap heat more powerfully than CO_2. They are usually referred to as CO₂ e (equivalents). Methane (CH₄) is one of the gases produced from livestock and is 21 times more powerful than CO₂ in trapping heat. So the overall number needs to be what percentage is the transport sector of all greenhouse gas emissions, my guess is it is probably half of 19.2% around 9.6%, so tackling transport in New Zealand is easier than Europe.

There is a positive here and that is if NZ is prepared to tackle transport emissions it could very easily embrace the Israeli model and become totally independent of oil from transport and develop models for use by other countries. See my next blog coming.

I understand that all countries have to get their Climate Bills through parliament. Australia is a long way from a vote and is still going through various consultative processes, Green papers followed by white papers. Australia is also an export oriented economy, with top heavy emissions from just one or two major sectors. The juggling act for countries is how to include the sector that produces most of the emissions and is the mainstay of the economy.  In the case of Australia the mining and energy sector are increasingly our major export earner, the drought partly due to climate Change has reduced exports from agriculture.

The USA will no doubt have a very complex process, if as both candidates Senator Obama and McCain say they intend to pass national Climate Change legislation, Kyoto compliant or not. (In other words will the US come up with their own Bill outside of the Kyoto accord).

The positive side of the US economy is that its exports are not so resource intensive such as raw materials, energy and agriculture. The domestic economy, which is very broad-based is powered by oil in transport and coal for energy. This is the US problem but it is a problem they have control over.

However, if the U.S could embrace alternative sources of energy and energy efficiency for power generation, and alternative transport fuels, they could find themselves in a much better place than export oriented economies.   See the US Climate Plans from Senator Obama and Senator McCain.

See Senator McCain proposed Climate Bill. and Senator Barack Obama proposed Climate Bills.