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How Tech Is Helping The Agriculture Sector Curb Carbon Emissions
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed stated that 2018 was a record-breaking year for climate, but 2019 doesn’t look much better. As the list of extreme weather events and climate shocks grows, so does our shared responsibility to act
A worker harvests Image: REUTERS/Edgar Su at a vertical farm in Singapore.
26 Jul 2019
Alzbeta Klein Director and Global Head, Climate Business , International Finance Corporation (IFC)
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed stated that 2018 was a record-breaking year for climate, but 2019 doesn’t look much better. As the list of extreme weather events and climate shocks grows, so does our shared responsibility to act.
For the agricultural sector, these weather events are particularly devastating, with increased cycles of more frequent floods and drought hitting many farmers. The good news is that, two years ago in Bonn, the world’s governments finally acknowledged for the first time that agriculture has a major role to play in our changing climate. Following a series of intense all-night discussions and years of division and deadlock, governments at COP23 finally agreed on the connection between industrialized farming and our warming climate.
The world’s leading climate scientists have concluded that how we farm and use our land (whether for food production, forestry, or other types of land use) is responsible for about one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. If we include emissions caused by the processing, transport, storage, cooling and disposal of the food that we consume, then that figure rises to more than 40% – an unthinkable price for how we farm and eat.
With the global population set to rise from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion between now and 2050, world governments are faced with an overwhelming dilemma: how to feed the future without putting irreparable strain on our planet’s already overburdened soils and oceans? I believe that technology can get us there.
Agricultural technology – or agtech – approaches like precision farming, drought- and pest-resistant seeds, mobile phones and digital technology platforms are a solution. They boost farmers’ profits by cutting costs and increasing yields and benefiting customers the world over. But more technological innovation is needed. Fortunately, some of the International Finance Corporation’s partners are at the forefront of innovation when it comes to agtech.
Take Planet Labs, an innovative geospatial start-up that uses 149 earth-observing satellites to generate a daily stream of high-resolution images of the earth’s surface for farmers to understand crop and soil changes from pre-season to harvest.
Planet Lab’s goal is to take images of the Earth’s entire surface every day to make climate change visible, accessible and actionable, according to Tara O’Shea, Planet’s director of forestry. Founded in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, the company visualizes daily changes across the Earth’s surface in real time. Until now, satellite imagery data was not frequent enough to react to crop stress in a timely manner. Planet’s daily imagery has been a game changer in the digital ag space – enabling farmers to manage their precision agriculture at scale and farm more efficiently, profitably, and sustainably.
Agriculture isn’t just a rural concern. As urban density increases around the world, and more and more people move to cities, locally sourced food is taking on greater importance. Crop One Holdings is a “vertical farming" company that is transforming the landscape of indoor farming in urban areas.
The term vertical farm is relatively new. It refers to a method of growing crops – in Crop One Holding’s case, leafy greens and lettuce – usually without soil or natural light, in beds stacked vertically inside a controlled-environment building. One of the company’s 320 sq ft units can substitute up to 19 acres of farmland and use 1/2500th of the water usage of field-based growing. In Boston, a Crop One Holding one-acre farm produces yields equivalent to that of a regular 400-acre farm.
Crop One drastically reduces the length of transportation as well as carbon use, due to the farms’ proximity to consumers. There is no soil used in the growing, nor any chemical intervention or pesticides. Competitive field products are usually 12 to 15 days old by the time they are delivered to a store, resulting in significant losses for the retailer.
Vertical farms that rise to the challenge of climate change are still in the early stages of development, but a recent $40 million joint venture between Crop One and Emirates Flight Catering to build the world’s largest vertical farming facility in Dubai suggests that agtech business models are showing potential to scale across markets.
That’s good news for my climate business team at IFC, who are helping existing and potential agribusiness clients acquire and leverage new agricultural technologies for both large scale and smallholder farms. Our “climate-smart” approach targets animal protein, land and crops, and food losses, yielding $1.3 billion in investments since 2017. Agtech can accelerate these investments and help farmers adopt more sustainable agronomic practices.
At this year’s One Planet Summit, IFC signed two agreements with the Kenya Tea Development Agency Power Company Ltd. (KTDA Power): one that enables carbon credits, and another that will support KTDA with various advisory activities such as financial literacy training for farmers, soil testing for productivity improvement and development of a wood-sourcing strategy.
How we farm matters. In addition to record-breaking temperatures, super typhoons and drought, Deputy Secretary-General Mohammed has also spoken about how 5G technology and AI can build smarter agricultural systems.
Feeding our growing population requires revolutionary transformations in farming and land cultivation. Adopting pioneering agricultural technologies with the potential to increase yields while limiting greenhouse gas emissions is an essential step. If agriculture is to continue to feed the world, then we must enable technology to shape the farms of the future.
Photosynthesis Fight: Researchers See Green Over Carbon Dioxide Results
Debate flares over results that challenged orthodoxy on how climate change will impact different types of plants. Kimberly Riskas reports.
How rising carbon dioxide levels will affect different types of plant is the topic of raging debate
MOHD NORHIZAM KAHAR / EYEEM / GETTY IMAGES
Earlier this year, a study published in the prestigious journal Science shook up the biology world by turning an accepted paradigm of plant growth on its head.
But now a pair of researchers is calling the findings into question, but the authors of the original work are standing their ground.
In comment pieces in the current issue of Science, the two sides face off over issues of soil conditions, plant biology and experimental design.
The original work, led by Peter Reich at the University of Minnesota, US, sought to understand how plant growth is affected by long-term high carbon dioxide levels. For 20 years, the team compared two groups of plants that employ slightly different methods of photosynthesis: the C3 pathway and the C4 pathway. (Read our report of the study here.)
Prevailing plant biology dogma states that C3 plants are more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels than are C4 plants. Therefore, plants using the C3 pathway should produce more biomass as levels rise.
Much to the researchers’ surprise, the C3 plants grew well initially, but then lost their edge after 12 years. Instead, the C4 plants showed accelerated growth in the last eight years of the study, with increases in biomass outstripping the control plants by as much as 24%.
To explain the switch in growth rates, Reid and colleagues hypothesised that long-term high carbon dioxide levels triggered changes in soil microbes and nutrient cycling — changes that favoured C4 plant growth but hampered that of C3 plants.
The findings suggested that it may be difficult to predict with certainty just how much atmospheric carbon can be captured by plants in the future. As the effects of anthropogenic climate change continue to unspool, Reich cautioned, “We shouldn’t be as confident [that] we’re right about the ability of … ecosystems to save our hides.”
Julie Wolf and Lewis Ziska from America’s USDA Agricultural Research, however, don’t fully agree.
It’s too early to say that the C3-C4 growth paradigm is invalidated, they say, with the evidence pointing to an alternative — and decidedly less revolutionary — explanation.
“The pattern documented by Reich et al. can be explained by considering the natural history of the experimental plants and soil,” the pair write.
First, they explain that the topsoil at the experimental sites had been scraped away and treated with chemicals before the experiment began. The resulting sandy, well-drained conditions would ultimately favour C4 plant growth over longer timescales.
They then point out that species diversity was low within the experimental sites. With a maximum of four plant species in each plot (and all of them grasses), Wolf and Ziska believe the results should not be extrapolated to “make a broad statement about the general responses of C3 and C4 grasses to elevated CO2.”
Finally, they also question whether the experimental design and statistical analysis can support the conclusions drawn.
However, Reich and colleagues hit back, arguing that these criticisms are unfounded.
They acknowledge that the soil plots were indeed processed prior to the experiment, although in a different way than Wolf and Ziska describe. Nevertheless, they assert that the soil setting mirrors the disturbances observed in Earth’s grasslands due to grazing, cropping and altered fire regimes, and therefore remains relevant to the discussion.
Further, while physiology undoubtedly played a role in how the plants grew in the experimental habitats, the authors maintain that it is still unclear how these differences explain the observed responses to elevated carbon dioxide.
And the issue with statistics? The analyses used are robust to mixed sample sizes, although this was not explained in the original paper.
Putting their differences aside, both sets of authors agree that future research is needed to elucidate the mechanisms responsible for the switch in plant growth rates.
Ending their rebuttal on a conciliatory tone, Reich and colleagues come as close to waxing lyrical as is allowed in the pages of Science.
“Ecosystems change over time in complex ways that we are only beginning to understand,” the authors acknowledge. “Finding the appropriate context for field experiments is always challenging and should be done carefully.”
As Temperatures Rise, Earth's Soil Is 'Breathing' More Heavily
Study suggests carbon stored in soil is entering atmosphere faster, thanks to microbes
News Release
August 01, 2018
- Tom Rickey, PNNL, (509) 375-3732
Dead leaves are a common source of carbon that makes its way into the soil and then into the atmosphere. A PNNL study shows that carbon in soil is entering our atmosphere at an increasing rate.
Credit: Vision Webagency / Unsplash
RICHLAND, Wash. — The vast reservoir of carbon stored beneath our feet is entering Earth's atmosphere at an increasing rate, most likely as a result of warming temperatures, suggest observations collected from a variety of the Earth's many ecosystems.
Blame microbes and how they react to warmer temperatures. Their food of choice — nature's detritus like dead leaves and fallen trees — contains carbon. When bacteria chew on decaying leaves and fungi chow down on dead plants, they convert that storehouse of carbon into carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere.
In a study published Aug. 2 in Nature, scientists show that this process is speeding up as Earth warms and is happening faster than plants are taking in carbon through photosynthesis. The team found that the rate at which microbes are transferring carbon from soil to the atmosphere has increased 1.2 percent over a 25-year time period, from 1990 through 2014.
While that may not seem like a big change, such an increase on a global scale, in a relatively short period of time in Earth history, is massive. The finding, based on thousands of observations made by scientists at hundreds of sites around the globe, is consistent with the predictions that scientists have made about how Earth might respond to warmer temperatures.
"It's important to note that this is a finding based on observations in the real world. This is not a tightly controlled lab experiment," said first author Ben Bond-Lamberty of the Joint Global Change Research Institute,a partnership between the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland.
"Soils around the globe are responding to a warming climate, which in turn can convert more carbon into carbon dioxide which enters the atmosphere. Depending on how other components of the carbon cycle might respond due to climate warming, these soil changes can potentially contribute to even higher temperatures due to a feedback loop," he added.
Globally, the soil holds about twice as much carbon as Earth's atmosphere. In a forest where stored carbon is manifest in the trees above, even more, carbon resides unseen underfoot. The fate of that carbon will have a big impact on our planet. Will it remain sequestered in the soil or will it enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, further warming the planet?
To address the question, the team relied heavily on two global science networks as well as a variety of satellite observations. The Global Soil Respiration Database includes data on soil respiration from more than 1,500 studies around the globe. And FLUXNET draws data from more than 500 towers around the world that record information about temperature, rainfall, and other factors.
"Most studies that address this question look at one individual site which we understand very well," said author Vanessa Bailey, a soil scientist. "This study asks the question on a global scale. We're talking about a huge quantity of carbon. Microbes exert an outsize influence on the world that is very hard to measure on such a large scale."
The study focused on a phenomenon known as "soil respiration," which describes how microbes and plants in the soil take in substances like carbon to survive, then give off carbon dioxide. Soils don't exactly breathe, but as plants and microbes in soil take in carbon as food, they convert some of it to other gases which they give off — much like we do when we breathe.
Scientists have known that as temperatures rise, soil respiration increases. Bond-Lamberty's team sought to compare the roles of the two main contributors, increased plant growth, and microbial action.
The team discovered a growing role for microbes, whose action is outstripping the ability of plants to absorb carbon. In the 25-year span of the study, the proportion of soil respiration that is due to microbes increased from 54 to 63 percent. Warmer temperatures can prompt more microbial action, potentially resulting in more carbon being released from carbon pools on land into the air.
"We know with high precision that global temperatures have risen," said Bond-Lamberty. "We'd expect that to stimulate microbes to be more active. And that is precisely what we've detected. Land is thought to be a robust sink of carbon overall, but with rising soil respiration rates, you won't have an intact land carbon sink forever."
In addition to Bond-Lamberty and Bailey, authors include Min Chen of JGCRI, Christopher Gough of Virginia Commonwealth University and Rodrigo Vargas of the University of Delaware.
The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
Tags: Environment, Fundamental Science, Climate Science, Subsurface Science, Atmospheric Science, Microbiology
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is the nation's premier laboratory for scientific discovery in chemistry, earth sciences, and data analytics and for solutions to the nation's toughest challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit PNNL's News Center.
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