Discussions of climate change keep running head-long into a barrier: China, India, Brazil and the other countries of the global South need to develop.
No leader of an underdeveloped country will ever agree to a climate change proposal that will take away that country’s right to develop. This isn’t so odd. Try explaining to the Chinese government that because the United States and Western Europe flooded the atmosphere with CO2 by burning readily accessible cheap fossil fuel for 150 years, their citizens will have to live without a decent standard of living, while we imperiously assert that we won’t divert more than a smidgen of our government budget to clean energy development and will keep occupying the country’s freeways and streets with gas-guzzlers.
Between the world's increasing population and its growing food consumption as poverty declines, experts predict we will need 70-100% more food by 2050.
How we might be able to produce that food is the subject of a report published in the journal Science called “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People.”
The paper, written by Britain's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, and nine other experts, does not offer specific recommendations, though the authors are working on those. They note that climate change and its impact on agriculture, soil and water resources will further complicate the task of feeding a world population estimated to hit 9 billion by 2050.
Warmer temperatures and rising sea levels are already forcing migrations of animals and plants, and invasive species may be some of biggest winners as habitat are disrupted by climatic changes.
Whether species survive new conditions brought by a changing climate will depend on their ability to move with those changes, says a study in the current issue of the journal Nature. Plants and animals, on average, will have to be able to migrate at a rate of about a quarter mile (0.42 km) a year in order to stay within the ecological "envelope" to which they are adapted, it says.
But as some species' envelopes shrink, others' are expanding, particularly those of invasive species and often at significant economic and ecological cost.
America produces a lot of food. So much food, in fact, that it is one of the world’s major food exporters, and so much grain and soy that we turn much of it into ethanol to power our cars.
Even excluding the calories that we export or turn into agro-fuels, per-capita caloric availability was 2,700 calories per person in 2007. That’s plenty of food. [Excel link]. No one should be hungry in a country that produces that much food.
But that doesn’t mean that many aren’t going hungry. The latest USDA survey results show that 14.6 percent of the American population — 17 million households — was food-insecure at some point in 2008. “Food insecure” means that the food consumption of one member of the household, or more, was reduced because they lacked for money or other ways to access food. That number shot up from 13 million households in 2007, 11.1 percent of the population.
Certainty is a luxury. When you’re rich, you can insure anything that isn’t certain. But when you’re poor and growing crops in Malawi, herding sheep in Mongolia, or sowing rice in Bangladesh, you’re at the mercy of the weather, a fickle force made even more so by climate change.
The governments of developing countries are already partly reliant on microfinance schemes to alleviate poverty. Now, several groups are calling for international support for a different type of microfinance — microinsurance — to help mitigate the risks posed by severe and abnormal weather patterns brought on by global warming.
Consider a farmer in Malawi who takes out a loan to buy seed for groundnuts, a common financial scenario among poor farmers in the region.
For much of the last 200 years, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide hovered around 275 parts per million. In this century, with atmospheric carbon dioxide nearing 390 ppm, and climbing annually by about 2.5 ppm, we are already beyond what many scientists see as a critical threshold in climate change.
Farmers around the world are already feeling the impact.
In India, the worst monsoon season since 1972 threatens the 60 percent of cropland that relies on rain; many fields weren’t even planted this year. In China, a drought that started in the north in the spring (leading some to suggest moving the capital, Beijing) now extends to the central and southern portions of the nation, and is being touted as the worst in 40 years.
The same situation is repeating itself in the Middle East, with serious impacts in Iraq, parts of Turkey, Jordan and Syria as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run dry. The Aral Sea, tapped to grow Russian cotton in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has lost 80 percent of its water since 2006.
In Africa, nations like Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya are experiencing severe drought. Where once the rains failed every nine or 10 years, they now fail every two to three years. In Kenya’s Kamba region, where many crops have withered, residents live on a meagre government dole and try to dig wells, but a subsurface rock layer stymies them. Dying livestock add to the turmoil, forcing cattle raids within and across borders that further threaten the stability of governments and facilitate the work of rebels, who leave behind their own trail of dead and dying.
At the Carbon Farming conference in Australia earlier this month, speakers pointed to a problem that has worried environmentalists for about a decade: peak soil.
China is losing soil 57 times faster than nature can replace it, according to John Crawford, a professor at the University of Sydney’s Institute of Soil Sciences. In the United States, conservation practices have helped reduce soil loss, but top soil is still being eroded 10 times faster than it can be replaced, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
This is a concern, not only because it limits the amount of food-producing land, but also because soil and the crops that grow in it can help sequester carbon, so the more of it we lose, the more carbon we leave out in the atmosphere.
The cause of all this soil loss? Ostensibly wind, rain and other natural forces, but industrial agriculture is also partly to blame, particularly the practices of monoculture, overgrazing, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and a lack of cover crops.
As governments fret over how a finite amount of land can feed an ever-increasing population, new research released today suggests that a “more equitable distribution of meat and dairy” between the diets of rich and poor countries can help avoid the ecological impacts associated with factory farming and reduce global warming emissions.
“Agribusiness and biotechnology companies are aggressively promoting their model of high-input, intensive farming as necessary to address the food and climate crises,” said Friends of the Earth food campaigner Kirtana Chandrasekaran. "This research blows their claims out of the water.”
They determined that it is possible to produce enough food for a booming population using methods that are both humane and do not require clearing forests to make room for agriculture, a major contributor to climate change.
Succeeding requires a diet balanced more evenly between meat and other food sources and between the wealthy Western countries and the developing world. FOE and CIWF recommend eating meat only three times a week, as opposed to the typical European diet of five times a week.
As the world gears up for the climate talks in Copenhagen next month, the mainstream media is overlooking one important climate change contributor, and it isn’t coal or cars.
Three years ago, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations released a lengthy report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” Among the plethora of environmental problems the livestock industry is accused of contributing to — water pollution, habit fragmentation and desertification of arable land among them — climate change figured prominently.
In particular, the report concluded that livestock production accounts for 18%, or one-fifth, of global emissions. This figure is higher than all transportation sources combined.
There’s a familiar dance being performed on the world stage. It’s called the Climate Shuffle. It has been going on for decades, but more people are watching now and every nation is practicing the steps.
The dance is not complicated. The goal is to get everybody dancing together, a kind of Clean Electric Slide. But first, insist you won’t get on the dance floor until everybody does. If you get there and find that everyone is doing his own thing, try the Unilateral Slide (one step forward, two steps back, moving in circles). Most of all, be prepared to dance fast because the music is speeding up.
