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Aquaponics Can Have Both Environmental And Cost Benefits
Although aquaponics systems, which combine conventional aquaculture with hydroponics, have become a hotly debated topic in future food production, data on the economic feasibility of aquaponics is relatively limited
Aquaculture is the farming of fish and other aquatic animals, while hydroponics involves growing plants without any soil. Both approaches have been successful on their own, however, combining fish and vegetable production — so-called aquaponics — could also be profitable, according to a new analysis published on 19 May in the journal Aquaculture Research (1).
Although aquaponics systems, which combine conventional aquaculture with hydroponics, have become a hotly debated topic in future food production, data on the economic feasibility of aquaponics is relatively limited.
To figure out how realistic the approach might be, researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) analyzed one year of real production data from an existing aquaponics system — the “Mueritzfischer” — located in Waren (Müritz) in Germany. The research system was build as part of INAPRO, an EU-funded project led by IGB aimed at demonstrating the viability of an innovative aquaponics system.
The 540-square-meter facilities produce fish and vegetables on a large scale in a combined recirculating system. The fish and plants are grown separately within the two recirculating systems and sensors are used to continuously monitor can connect the two systems when needed to create optimal growth conditions.
The authors examined two different scenarios and performed an extensive profitability analysis. One scenario showed that the aquaponics approach can be profitable if facilities are sufficiently large. Using this scenario, the researchers developed a model case, which they used to calculate figures for different sized facilities.
Under the right conditions, aquaponics can have both environmental and cost benefits, according to the authors. The main barriers to the commercialization of aquaponics are the high investment costs and high operating costs such as for fish feed, labor, and energy, particularly in countries like Germany. Another challenge is that profitability largely depends on the market environment and the production risks, which can be difficult to predict.
Lead author Goesta Baganz believes there might be huge potential for aquaponics in urban areas: “The already profitable model case would cover an overall space of about 2,000 square meters. This would mean that professional aquaponics would also be possible in urban and peri-urban areas, where space is scarce and often relatively expensive.”
“If, therefore, urban aquaponics can make a profit on such a scale, there is even greater opportunity for local food production, which is becoming increasingly important throughout the world as urbanization progresses”, Baganz explained.
In a global context, Professor Werner Kloas, who led the project, said: “Considering current problems like climate change, population growth, urbanization as well as overexploitation and pollution of natural resources, global food production is the largest pressure caused by humans on Earth, threatening ecosystems and the stability of societies. Consequently, one of the key societal goals is to achieve eco-friendly, efficient food production,”
(1) Baganz, G. et al. Profitability of multi‐loop aquaponics: Year‐long production data, economic scenarios and a comprehensive model case. Aquaculture Research (2020). DOI: 10.1111/are.14610
Yes, There Really Is An Arugula Shortage
Unexpectedly wet weather and a serious fungal infection have disrupted the rocket supply chain. Thanks to climate change, we can expect more volatility in the future
Unexpectedly wet weather and a serious fungal infection have disrupted the rocket supply chain. Thanks to climate change, we can expect more volatility in the future.
January 27th, 2020
by Jessica Fu
In any given week, the Bix Produce Company in Little Canada, Minnesota, ships between 1,600 and 2,000 pounds of arugula to restaurants and cafeterias throughout the Twin Cities region. Like most wholesalers, Bix sources its winter leafy greens from farms in the desert Southwest and Florida, where it’s warm enough to grow the produce at this time of year. The field-to-fridge journey typically takes around four days. But this week is not a typical week.
Right now, growers in the Southwest are suffering from a severe arugula shortage, brought on by an unexpectedly colder and wet winter growing season. The conditions have paved the way for the spread of a fungal disease called downy mildew. Simultaneously, growers in Florida—which supply a smaller portion of winter greens than the Southwest—are holding clients to strict buying limits, Eric Reitz, a buyer for Bix, tells me. That means distributors can’t make up the difference by going to another supplier: “There’s just not enough volume to cover it.”
You may have been tipped off about arugula’s woes while grocery shopping or ordering lunch. A number of restaurants have announced that they’ve started to substitute spinach in its place because of low supplies. One reporter shared on Twitter a photo of an arugula pizza they’d ordered, which contained no more than a pitiful pinch of “half-leaves.” I began to suspect that there might be some kind of deficit two weeks ago at Trader Joe’s after my cashier commented offhandedly that arugula hadn’t appeared in the retailer’s inventory tracking system for a few days.
“In Florida, we shouldn’t be having any rain right now, it’s considered the dry season.”
For Del Bene, a produce wholesaler serving the Detroit region, the shortage has been an issue since the beginning of 2020. Vice president Mike Del Bene tells me it’s the most intense arugula shortage the company has experienced in nearly 30 years. (Keep in mind, he noted, arugula wasn’t nearly as popular three decades ago.)
“We definitely haven’t been harvesting much the last couple of weeks,” says Matt McGuire, chief agricultural officer of JV Smith, a vegetable farming company in Yuma, Arizona. “In the desert Southwest, we’re supposed to be dry. We usually don’t get rain much, even in the wintertime. But through a part of November and December, we were having storms dropping anywhere from a quarter to an inch of water every seven to 10 days.” And those were the exact conditions that welcomed in the downy mildew, which had been waiting in the weeds.
Once infected, arugula leaves become spotted with yellow lesions that can make them fall off and even kill an entire plant. As a pathogen, downy mildew spreads rapidly and can kneecap the yield of an entire field. Interestingly, the mildew is specific to arugula. “Cross infection does not take place,” says plant pathologist Steve Koike, formerly of the University of California Cooperative Extension. That means that the mildew pathogen spreading around Arizona’s arugula fields can’t transfer over to, say, spinach and lettuce, too. However, that also means that there’s no catch-all fungicide that can treat the issue either.
Representatives from three other growers in Arizona shared similar concerns about the impact that downy mildew has had on the recent arugula harvest. In an unfortunate coincidence exacerbating the shortage, producers in Florida, have had their share of harvesting woes due to wetter-than-usual weather, too.
“In Florida, we shouldn’t be having any rain right now, it’s considered the dry season,” says Eberhard Mueller, co-owner of Satur Farms, which sells packaged leafy green products. Heavier than normal rains in December have disrupted Mueller’s harvest; he tells me that his operation has encountered more and more moisture throughout his time in the business—something he suspects is related to climate change.
Bacteria and other molds can continue to flourish even after arugula has been packaged and shipped.
That falls in line with the deluge of weather-related ag difficulties that farmers have encountered in recent times. Just last year, farms in Minnesota and North Dakota experienced colder and wetter weather than usual, creating a sugar shortage that compelled the Department of Agriculture to raise import limits from Mexico. A few months earlier, flooding in the Midwest and the Great Plains submerged some of America’s most productive farmland underwater. In California, farmers are calling abnormal weather patterns the “new normal” and trying to adapt accordingly. And there’s no shortage of research linking rising temperatures with erratic and extreme weather events.
Chances are, the further away from Florida and the desert Southwest you are, the less likely you are to find arugula at the grocery store right now. For one, mildew-infected arugula is vulnerable to what is known as “secondary spoilage,” according to Trevor Suslow, an extension research specialist at the University of California, Davis. In essence, Suslow says that bacteria and other molds can continue to flourish even after arugula has been packaged and shipped. “Those things can grow even under refrigeration temperatures,” he explains. This means that infected arugula probably won’t survive the journey from Yuma to your local supermarket, at least not in a condition that you’d still like to eat.
Then there’s the issue of cost. As with most retail products, a drop in arugula supply causes prices to rise, explains Teressa Lopez, administrator of the Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement. Consequently, some cost-averse retailers might simply opt-out of buying rocket salad until the market stabilizes. Most growers I spoke with estimated that the arugula harvest would gradually return to “normal” in the next few weeks, though none were specific about timing—and understandably so.
Right now, all companies like Bix and Del Bene can do is keep customers in the know about the shortage, and hope that it lets up soon. As Reitz of Bix says: “It’s been a bumpy ride.”
ENVIRONMENT, HOME FEATURE ARUGULA CLIMATE CHANGE SHORTAGE SUPPLY CHAIN
Jessica is a reporter for The New Food Economy. Reach her by email at jessica.fu@newfoodeconomy.org and on Twitter @JessTiaFu.
Will Buffalo Become A Climate Change Haven?
“Buffalo is stepping up and preparing to welcome this new type of refugee,” said the city’s mayor, Byron Brown. “We believe that we can accommodate people who have experienced displacement due to harsh weather and natural disaster.”
DECEMBER 5, 2019
The Western New York City possesses a distinct mix of weather, geography, and infrastructure that could make it a potential climate haven. But for whom?
When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Maria Robles saw rainfall so severe that it punched a hole through her roof and flooded her home in San Juan. “We lost everything inside the house,” she said. “Everything, everything, everything.”
The storm marked the beginning of a long journey that took her from the convention center in San Juan to a hotel in Florida to an airport in Philadelphia, concluding with an 11-hour bus ride to Buffalo, New York — her husband had once visited the city as a teenager and remembered liking it. She arrived with two of her four children in tow. It didn’t take long for Robles and her family to settle into their new home. She landed a job in a factory that makes face cream, lip balm, and other personal care products, while her husband found a job in a plastics factory. Robles said she still struggles with the frigid weather, but she would gladly take a snowstorm over a hurricane any day.
Robles may not have known it when she moved in, but Buffalo is unusually well-insulated against climate change. Rising temperatures have yet to produce more heat waves or extreme rainfall in Western New York. Experts say the region’s cool climate and ample freshwater could make it an attractive destination as the planet heats up. And Buffalo has room to grow — the city’s population has dropped by half over the last 70 years of industrial decline.
These facts have not gone unnoticed. In his 2019 State of the City address, the mayor dubbed Buffalo a “Climate Refuge City.” Civic leaders are hopeful that the coming wave of climate refugees will revive Buffalo, filling its vacant lots and abandoned storefronts.
“Buffalo is stepping up and preparing to welcome this new type of refugee,” said the city’s mayor, Byron Brown. “We believe that we can accommodate people who have experienced displacement due to harsh weather and natural disaster.”
As Buffalo becomes a more appealing place to migrate, can it remain a haven for refugees like Robles, who come in search of affordable housing and a decent job? Or will Buffalo become a cold-weather haven for the professional class? With ample space for newcomers, Buffalo doesn’t look like cities typically at risk for gentrifying. But what happens if high earners from vulnerable cities like Miami and New York flock to the shores of Lake Erie? Will Buffalo be prepared?
“With climate change, the world is going to suck, but Buffalo may suck less.”
In 2016, SUNY Buffalo State climate scientist Stephen Vermette set out to show how climate change had made life harder in western New York with the hope of galvanizing locals to take up arms against the carbon crisis. He scoured weather records going back to 1965 and found that temperatures have risen a little more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over that time, roughly consistent with the rest of the Lower 48.
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Scientists Consider Vertical Farming Ahead of Changing Climate
University of Arizona agricultural and biological engineering professor Joel Cuello is among those developing vertical farming methods that do not use soil or depend on the weather but use water more efficiently
DECEMBER 13, 2019
by Anthony Perkins TWEET SHARE
A UA researcher says the technique could help solve future food concerns.
Scientists are focusing on new ways of farming that can be climate-smart and sustainable.
University of Arizona agricultural and biological engineering professor Joel Cuello is among those developing vertical farming methods that do not use soil or depend on the weather but use water more efficiently.
He thinks interest in sustainable growing methods increased with the growth of the middle class in countries like China.
"That really brought to the fore the critical significance of having our food supply increase because that is a humongous middle class that has been produced, not only in China but all over the world," said Cuello.
Cuello added scientists are considering the same techniques for growing food in future habitats on the moon and Mars.
MORE: AGRICULTURE, CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT, NEWS, SCIENCE
Lead Photo: Vertical farmed plants are fed with liquid nutrients instead of soil.Needpix.com
Report: Sea Level Rise To Affect 3x More People Than Anticipated
Rising sea levels will severely impact nearly triple the number of people previously estimated to be affected, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications and co-authored by the CEO of Climate Central
AUTHOR: Katie Pyzyk@_PyintheSky
October 31, 2019
Dive Brief:
Rising sea levels will severely impact nearly triple the number of people previously estimated to be affected, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications and co-authored by the CEO of Climate Central. The data suggests coastal flooding (at least once per year) will reach levels where 300 million people currently live, and more than 150 million people live in locations that could be permanently inundated by 2050.
Climate Central's interactive map that accompanies the study shows old projections compared with the expanded risk areas. The map indicates that whole cities could be inundated; in the United States, for example, most of New Orleans and large portions of New York are among the numerous communities shown to be underwater or prone to frequent, severe flooding by 2050.
The areas of most concern are concentrated in developing countries in Asia. More than 70% of the world's population currently living on implicated land are in just eight Asian countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. However, the increased flood risk touches every continent.
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Coastal communities worldwide must prepare for more difficult times than previously anticipated, according to the study. Cities with dense populations like New York and Mumbai are projected to experience serious flooding impacts if no actions are taken to prevent the negative consequences. Flooding effects are projected to be widespread, but major global cities could experience particularly harsh consequences that carry to other areas.
Jakarta, Indonesia, is a city projected to face large swaths of permanent inundation. The city has long been known to be sinking, in part due to land management decisions, exacerbating flooding caused by rising sea levels. The Indonesian president announced this year that the multi-island nation's capital would move from Jakarta to a new location on the island of Borneo. Moving an entire governmental hub to an area known for its beaches and rainforests undoubtedly will turn out to be no small feat.
Coastal flooding reportedly will have profound economic and political implications for the affected countries, which could have a ripple effect on other countries. The expense of relocating people away from rising waters — such as the Jakarta case, or otherwise — is incredibly expensive both for citizens and governments. New infrastructures must be built and others reinforced to support an influx of citizens moving to a new area in a short amount of time.
Besides everyday infrastructure such as transportation, utilities or buildings, coastal cities will need to reconsider the integrity of their flood prevention infrastructure. The study suggests that levees, seawalls and other preventative measures already in place will need to be expanded to cover more territory as sea levels rise. In addition, existing coastal infrastructure likely will not protect against the enhanced threats without continued maintenance and upgrades.
"[E]ven in the US, sea-level rise this century may induce large-scale migration away from unprotected coastlines, redistributing population density across the country and putting great pressure on inland areas," the study says.
Beyond the raw expense of moving populations away from a coast, the study warns against social and political instability. Historically, conflict erupts in areas that experience a large-scale migration, especially in resource-constrained areas. The study recommends further research should be performed on the timing, locations, and intensity of global migrations related to flooding.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia
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Greenhouses In Southern France Demolished By Extreme Weather
This week’s weather around the Mediterranean caused a lot of damage in the south of France; the French government declared a state of a natural disaster
This week’s weather around the Mediterranean caused a lot of damage in the south of France; the French government declared a state of natural disaster. In Béziers, 6 gallons per square feet fell in 24 hours. Other municipalities in France and in Spain were also severely affected. The episode inevitably has consequences for the fruit and vegetable sector.
“We have not drawn a report yet, but several crops have been affected in France and in Spain,” reports Charles Farran de Ritex, wholesaler based in Perpignan. “In France, it is the season of autumn and winter vegetables like artichokes and lettuce. For those products, water is not necessarily a bad thing, and we hope that there won’t be too much damage. The apple and pear orchards are probably also affected. Other products like the tomatoes are grown in greenhouses so they will not be directly impacted. However, several greenhouses have been destroyed by the storm in the region of Nîmes and Avignon.”
In Spain, the Mediterranean episode also had some impact. “Grapes were severely affected by the water,” explains Charles, who imports a lot of his products from Spain.
Nearly 108,000 square feet of greenhouses blown away
As he was about to pick his lettuce, Eric Vidal saw a small tornado, on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, blow away 108,000 square feet of his farm located at the heart of the Jardins Saint Jacques. He reported to the newspaper L’Indépendent that “everything is ruined, both the facilities and all the lettuce of course, which is mostly produced for fast food restaurants. We were supposed to harvest in 10 days, it’s a dry loss. Luckily, I have insurance.”
The cause of the damage is a devastating blast limited to one corridor. More minor damage has been reported in the same area. “When I arrived at the greenhouses, I understood right away that something had happened. The greenhouses in the back were completely crushed. It was like a bull ran through, destroying everything. The surprising thing is that the other facilities, right next to them, were not affected at all,” explains Eric.
The farm had already suffered from a similar situation in January 2009 with storm Klaus. “After the expert’s report, we will have to disassemble, clean and rebuild everything. We won’t get any lettuce until next summer.” The farm is likely to lay off part of its staff temporarily.
Source: lindependant.fr
Publication date: Mon 28 Oct 2019
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‘We Really Need To Wake Up Quickly’: Al Gore Warns of A Looming Food Crisis Caused By Climate Change
Some 40 panelists, most of them farmers and scientists, took the stage to discuss topics from healthy soil to carbon sequestration, but the main event was Gore’s slide show, delivered with his characteristic mix of bravado and humility, detailing the impacts of climate change on food systems worldwide
Former vice president Al Gore backstage at the Time 100 Health Summit in New York in October. (Craig Barritt/Getty Images For Time 100 Health)
By Amanda Little
Oct. 22, 2019
CARTHAGE, Tenn. — “I’ve done so many presentations I just never get nervous anymore, but I was nervous before this one — so much new material,” Al Gore said last week as he launched into the latest iteration of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the slide show that won him an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and a Grammy. Gore had invited 300 guests — chefs, farmers, food executives, and activists — to “The Climate Underground,” a two-day conference last week at his family farm here that explored the intersection of food, climate change and sustainable agriculture.
Some 40 panelists, most of them farmers and scientists, took the stage to discuss topics from healthy soil to carbon sequestration, but the main event was Gore’s slide show, delivered with his characteristic mix of bravado and humility, detailing the impacts of climate change on food systems worldwide.
Will technology or tradition save the global food supply? Why not both?
“This is in Georgia; a heatwave cooked these apples before they could be harvested,” he said, issuing forth rapid-fire examples alongside bone-chilling images and video. “This is the Australia wine region that’s going to be untenable. . . . Rice yields in 80 percent of Japan have declined due to the rising temperatures. . . . In nearby Murfreesboro, Tenn., we’ll see a quarter decline in soybean yields within the next 30 years.”
Gore spent the better part of 90 minutes detailing the pressures of drought, heat, flooding, superstorms, “rain bombs,” invasive insects, fungi and bacterial blight on food producers. “We may be approaching a threshold beyond which the agriculture that we’ve always known cannot support human civilization as we know it,” he declared in a low growl. “That’s something we need to avoid.”
Alice Waters, who Gore said catalyzed his interest in food and who had volunteered to cook the vegetarian lunches served to attendees (using local, seasonal and organic ingredients, natch), said the presentation was bittersweet: “I am deeply depressed. But on the other hand, the solution seems so, so unbelievably transformational. . . . We can restore the health of the planet while also restoring the health of people and communities.”
Naomi Starkman, editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, which covers news on sustainable agriculture, was similarly fraught: “Gore spoke with such devastating and fierce clarity, connecting the dots between the ways agriculture is implicated in and impacted by the climate crisis. But it also felt like a hopeful moment wherein agriculture, and farmers in particular, are taking a front-and-central place in solving one of the most urgent issues of our time.”
Mark Bittman, the former New York Times food columnist, was more circumspect: “There are ways in which the conversation here isn’t quite realistic. Regenerative agriculture is not about increased yield, it’s about producing more of the right food in the right ways. ... But kudos to Al Gore for taking it on. There’s no more important conversation to have.”
I sat down with the former vice president to dive deeper into the details. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:
Q: The main way most humans will experience climate change is through its impact on food: Is this a fair statement?
A: Ever since 2015, it’s been clear that the impact on the food system was underestimated in previous years. And there is a natural resistance that many of us have had to getting too concerned about the food system. Food insecurity had been declining steadily for the last couple of decades, just as extreme poverty had been declining. But in the last couple of years, that too has changed, and the principal reason is the climate crisis.
Africa, by mid-century, will have more people than either China or India. And by end of century, more people than China and India combined. And you combine that with the impact of the climate crisis on subsistence agriculture in Africa, the importance of subsistence agriculture in Africa, the poor quality of the soils, the persistent problems of land tenure, and the economic and social structures that discourage good stewardship of the land, then, wow. We really need to wake up quickly to the serious crisis that could develop there.
We have no idea yet how to feed the planet without frying it
Q: What are the most crucial policy measures that need to be taken to encourage regenerative farming in the U.S. and climate-smart agriculture broadly?
A: We need leadership to completely refocus USDA to completely change the system of farm subsidies to stop the massive subsidies for crops that are not eaten by people, that go to biofuels, that go to animal feed. We should eventually work our way toward a system for compensating farmers for the buildup of soil carbon. That’s not possible yet, partly because we are still developing a measurement of soil carbon buildup that is necessary for the confidence of policymakers and voters that this is not some boondoggle. But eventually, that’s where we need to be.
Q: On one hand you have Bill Gates saying, “The time has come to reinvent food,” and on the other you have Alice Waters and others saying, “Let’s de-invent food, let’s go back to preindustrial agriculture,” essentially. What do you think the role of tech should be?
Alice Waters, at The Washington Post in 2017, has advocated for a return to traditional farming. (Kristoffer Tripplaar/For The Washington Post)
A: We want a single, magic answer that’s going to solve a big, complicated problem, and I think that in agriculture and food and climate, these systemic approaches are usually more likely to be successful. But technology and science has an important role to play. Measuring soil carbon is one. That team at the Salk Institute has a really interesting proposal to modify roots to sequester more suberin, a form of carbon that stays in the soil for a long time. If their hypothesis is correct, the root structures of food plants can be made much more robust in a way that simultaneously sequesters more organic carbon and increases yields. So that’s technology that is worth exploring and evaluating.
In general, the solutions in agriculture are more to be found in going back to some traditional approaches that worked but were discarded because of the pressure for short-term profit maximization. And that includes crop rotation. It includes cover crops to put key chemicals and nutrients back in the soil after it’s been used for a particular cash crop. It includes rotational grazing, which is not without controversy but has been proven to work, at least on farms of this scale.
Climate change is sapping nutrients from our food — and it could become a global crisis
Q: What role must consumers play in the shift toward sustainable food systems and climate resilience?
A: There’s a danger in focusing on consumer behavior. There’s a danger of giving the impression that the solutions to the climate crisis have to be shouldered by women and men who care enough about it to change their personal choices. They do. But as important as it is to change a lightbulb, it is way more important to change policies. And in order to change policies, we have to have new policymakers. So the most important role that individuals can play is in taking their concern and passion for a better world into the voting booth and turning out in large numbers to overcome the dominance of our political system by big money.
Q: Some permaculture and regenerative farmers that I met with have said that it’s more expensive to farm this way. They can’t afford their own products. How do we address that?
A: I don’t want to deny the premise of your question, but some regenerative farmers have saved a lot of money on their input costs. Now, how do we develop markets for healthier, organic, regenerative-agriculture food? That’s one of the reasons we’re incorporating efforts to get school systems and hospitals and nursing homes and long-term care facilities to provide markets for healthier food.
Q: Still, there are real concerns from middle- and low-income consumers that this is an elitist movement.
Solar panels on a home in Maryland in 2016. (Benjamin C Tankersley/For The Washington Post)
A: It hasn’t been very many years since solar panels were considered an elitist movement. And you heard exactly the same critique. “For those who can afford them, that’s fine. But don’t tell me that’s going to be a significant development, because only the wealthy elite are doing it.” Well, that’s not true anymore, because that was the beginning of a movement that drove scale and accelerated the cost reduction curve. And now you’ve got people putting rooftop solar on and community solar, and it is really taking off dramatically. But it started as an elitist movement. The same thing is beginning to be true of electric vehicles. If we can democratize and widely distribute the soil carbon assessment technologies, I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine technology driving the cost down to the point where this can spread more rapidly.
Q: The agriculture industry is so interesting because it is a major driver of the climate problem, but it is also more vulnerable than any other industry to the pressures of climate change.
A: Many pioneers of regenerative agriculture are finding that their farms are more resilient to drought and flood and extreme weather than with the older established farming techniques. Building the health of the soil does not mean just more organic carbon. It also means building the ability of the soil to absorb the higher rainfall events and to withstand drought events more effectively.
Q: One scientist said to me the most delicious fruits are dying because the specialist crops, the ones that we love the most, are hardest to adapt to new circumstances. Of all the crops that are most vulnerable, which would be the hardest for you to live without?
A: Chocolate. Cacao. Absolutely.
Little is author of “The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World” (Harmony, 2019).
Amazon Plans To Have 100,000 Electric Delivery Vans On The Road By 2030
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has revealed that his company has placed an order for 100,000 electric delivery vans from Michigan-based electric vehicle company Rivian
09.20.19
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has revealed that his company has placed an order for 100,000 electric delivery vans from Michigan-based electric vehicle company Rivian. Amazon says its order of 100,000 vehicles is the largest order ever of electric delivery vehicles. It is just one of the ways Amazon pledged on Thursday to help combat climate change.
Our fleet is Electrifying! Thrilled to announce the order of 100,000 electric delivery vehicles – the largest order of electric delivery vehicles ever. Look out for the new vans starting in 2021.
Amazon says that the goal with the vans is to have all 100,000 of them on the road by 2030. Yes, that’s a decade away, but the company will begin the Rivian van rollout much earlier—in 2021. By 2022, Amazon says it hopes to have 10,000 of the vehicles on the road. And once all 100,000 hit the roads by 2030, Amazon says it will save 4 million metric tons of carbon per year.
The announcement was made as part of Amazon’s Climate Pledge, which sets the goal of meeting the historic Paris Agreement 10 years early—by the year 2040. Bezos says that by 2030 it wants Amazon running on 100% renewable energy, and by 2040 it wants the company to be a net-zero carbon producer. The Paris Agreement’s goal is for companies and countries to hit these metrics by 2050.
Announcing its new set of climate action plans, Bezos said:
We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue—we’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference. If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon—which delivers more than 10 billion items a year—can meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early, then any company can. I’ve been talking with other CEOs of global companies, and I’m finding a lot of interest in joining the pledge. Large companies signing The Climate Pledge will send an important signal to the market that it’s time to invest in the products and services the signatories will need to meet their commitments.
Global Warming: Grapes Are Ripening Faster
Due to their sensitivity to weather, grapes are also very useful for getting a peek into past climates. This means that the start of the harvest is ideal as a kind of climate proxy
©pixabay
Posted by Almut Otto | Sep 4, 2019
How does a vintner know that the grapes are ripe? By the traditional method, they taste the grapes themselves. Like this: put the grape in your mouth, bite into it, let the juice run out and in doing so determine the sugar and alcohol content. And it is precisely the latter that could become an issue in the traditional growing regions over the next few years and decades. According to a study by the University of Bern, the grape harvest in Burgundy has been starting 13 days earlier on average than it has in the past six centuries.
Grapes are sensitive to changes in temperature
This result is on the one hand interesting for winemakers and wine lovers. This is because grapes are very sensitive to temperature and rain. Higher temperatures make the grapes ripen faster. And the resulting increase in dryness also results in a higher alcohol content. Which is not what is supposed to happen, not just because the trend is towards lighter wines. Wines with too high an alcohol content also taste slightly ‘burnt,’ In order to avoid this, the artful technical skill (for which the Germans are world-renowned, as it happens) of the master vintner is now in high demand.
According to Frank R. Schulz, head of the communications department at the German Wine Institute, German winegrowers are able to benefit from the current situation, at least for a short while. “We are now in a position to make the most of it. World vine varieties such as Merlot or Sauvignon Blanc, which were previously only native to southern Europe, are now growing here. Whereas in Spain the grape harvest is much lower than in previous years, in the main due to drought. And even in northern Germany, such as on Sylt or in Schleswig-Holstein, attempts are now being made to cultivate grape varieties. And last but not least, sparkling wine viniculture in the south of England also shows that wine regions could shift over the long term. In order to be able to react to climate changes, the southern regions are working on improving their varieties. For example, a thicker skin makes the grapes somewhat more resistant.
Grapes act as a climate proxy
Due to their sensitivity to weather, grapes are also very useful for getting a peek into past climates. This means that the start of the harvest is ideal as a kind of climate proxy. It is an indirect indicator of change, as we have seen in other natural archives. These include tree rings, ice cores and corals. Plus, historical documents like the grape harvest. The scientists from Bern used a series of data from the grape harvest of the past 664 years for their analysis.
“We did not predict that the rapid rise in temperatures since the 1980s would be so clearly visible in this time series,” explains Christian Pfister, Professor Emeritus of Climate and Environmental History at the University of Bern and a member of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Research.
He was responsible for the study together with colleagues from Switzerland, France and Germany.
Records of wages paid to harvest workers
The main author of the study, Thomas Labbé, who conducts research at the universities of Burgundy and Leipzig, meticulously reconstructed as far back as 1354 the data from grape harvests in Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy. He used a large number of unpublished archive sources, including information on wage payments to grape pickers, records from Beaune City Council and newspaper reports. The uninterrupted recording of grape harvest data is the longest reconstructed time series of its kind and ended in 2018.
“The harvest records clearly show two phases,” says Thomas Labbé. Until 1987, the grapes were typically harvested on or after 28 September. Since 1988, however, the grape harvest has started on average 13 days earlier. Analyses of the data show that hot and dry years were unusual in the past, but have since become normal in the last 30 years. The research team consisting of historians and natural scientists has validated its time lines with the help of detailed temperature records taken over the past 360 years in Paris. This made it possible to estimate temperatures between April and July for the Beaune region throughout the 664 years covered by the dataset.
From research to action
“The transition into a period of rapid global warming after 1988 is very clear. And it is obvious to everyone that the past 30 years have been extraordinary,” Christian Pfister states.
“I hope that our recent work will help people realistically assess the current state of our planet’s climate and finally begin to take action.”
This unique reconstruction of the Burgundy grape harvest has just been published in the journal “Climate of the Past” published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
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| Tags: climate change, German Wine Institute, Grapes, University of Bern
America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting In The Florida Keys
Lori Rittel is stuck in her Florida Keys home, living in the wreckage left by Hurricane Irma two years ago, unable to rebuild or repair. Now her best hope for escape is to sell the little white bungalow to the government to knockdown
Lori Rittel’s home in Marathon Keys, on Sept. 16 . Photographer: Jayme Gershen/Bloomberg
Mass migration begins as coastal homes are bulldozed in the state facing the biggest threat from climate-driven inundation.
By Prashant Gopal September 20, 2019
Lori Rittel is stuck in her Florida Keys home, living in the wreckage left by Hurricane Irma two years ago, unable to rebuild or repair. Now her best hope for escape is to sell the little white bungalow to the government to knockdown.
Her bedroom is still a no-go zone so she sleeps in the living room with her cat and three dogs. She just installed a sink in the bathroom, which is missing a wall, so she can wash her dishes inside the house now. Weather reports make her nervous. “I just want to sell this piece of junk and get the hell out,” she said. “I don’t want to start over. But this will happen again.”
Lori Rittel . Photographer: Jayme Gershen/Bloomberg
The Great Climate Retreat is beginning with tiny steps, like taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas from Staten Island, New York, to Houston and New Orleans — and now Rittel’s Marathon Key. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map.
By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008.
The U.S. government’s philosophy has been that local officials are in the best position to decide what needs to be done. Consequently, the effort has so far been ad hoc, with local and state governments using federal grants from the last disaster to pay for buyouts designed to reduce the damage from the next one.
“The scale of this is almost unfathomable,” said Billy Fleming, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “If we take any of the climate science seriously, we’re down to the last 10 to 12 years to mobilize the full force of the government and move on managed retreat. If we don’t, it won’t matter, because much of America will be underwater or on fire.”
If not for the $174,000 that Rittel, 60, owes on her mortgage, the Montana transplant would have left long ago. Insurance money is insufficient to rebuild, so she applied for one of the buyouts, administered by the state with $75 million of Irma-relief cash from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as long as it lasts.
The inside of Lori Rittel’s home. Photographer: Jayme Gershen/Bloomberg
Florida accounts for 40% of the riskiest coastal land in the U.S., according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, but it’s done little so far to pull people back from the coasts and lags behind states such as New Jersey, North Carolina, and Texas. Across the country, the effort is still more theory than practice, even as a consensus among planners grows that “managed retreat” may be the best of bad options.
This year, HUD made available $16 billion for climate resilience, its first dedicated fund to fortify for future storms. Nine states, plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, will decide how to use it, whether to build sea walls, put houses on stilts or move people out of the way. The money is a fraction of what’s needed, and the process is moving at the speed of government.
A study by the Natural Resources Defense Council this month found that buyouts by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which responds to disasters, take five years on average to be completed. By that time, many homeowners have rebuilt or moved. Similar data isn’t available on the grants from HUD, which also provides money to demolish homes.
“It’s a slow-motion emergency,” said Rob Moore, director of NRDC’s water and climate team. “But it’s happening right now. These last three hurricane seasons show us what it kind of looks like.”
A FEMA spokesman said the agency supports the voluntary acquisition of flood-prone structures and provides the grant funding, but the prioritization of projects happens at the local level first and then by the state acting as the recipient. The agency believes each county floodplain manager and local official knows the needs of their communities best and are responsible for land usage and permitting.
About 6 million Floridians will need to move inland by century’s end to avoid inundation, according to Hauer, the demographer, in a 2016 paper. By then, about 80% of the nearby Keys, the archipelago that includes the tourist mecca of Key West, will be underwater. About 3.5 million people would be flooded in South Florida’s Miami-Dade and Broward, the two counties with America’s biggest exposed populations.
“Florida’s doing it at a really small scale,” said A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware who studies climate adaptation. “Compared with the new housing units going up in South Florida, I don’t know if that would even cancel out.”
Here Comes the Flood
Number of people at risk by county from a sea-level rise of 1.8 meters
Florida State University demographer Matt Hauer
But Florida runs on tourism and real estate revenue, and managed retreat is a phrase that makes real estate listing agents nervous. But there’s another Florida housing bubble waiting to pop. The Union of Concerned Scientists warns of a coming housing crash — from Miami to San Mateo, California — on a scale worse than last decade’s foreclosure crisis, caused by climate change — from flooding to heatwaves and wildfires.
Cities are only starting to grapple with where to resettle residents, and how to transport communities and hometown identities. And homes on higher ground will also demand higher prices, worsening an affordability crisis.
Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana is trying to relocate the Native American settlement of about 100 people on the Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow island that lost 98% of its land over the past six decades to climate change. It’s working with a $48 million grant from HUD for buyouts and to help them start anew on a 500-acre sugar cane field 40 miles north that the government will populate with homes and businesses. Importantly, it will be 9 feet above sea level. All but three of about 40 households have signed on.
``They’re starting to scale this up,’’ said Jesse Keenan, a social scientist at Harvard University who also specializes in climate adaptation. ``This is about building up institutional knowledge on how to do this.’’
New Jersey has a $300 million fund for buyouts and has purchased hundreds of houses since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, though like Florida, even more, homes have been built on the coast in the meantime. Harris County, Texas — which includes Houston, ravaged by a series of storms including 2017’s Harvey — has done more than 3,000 FEMA buyouts, more than any other county in the U.S., according to NRDC.
In Monroe County, Florida, where Rittel lives, the planning is just beginning. The county has applied for $5 million of the HUD money — the state maximum. Already, about 60 local homeowners have applied, so it will require triage. Senior citizens, families and residents in the riskiest flood zone would get priority, said Assistant County Administrator Christine Hurley.
Rittel isn’t sure how long she can hang on.
Her insurance payout of about $100,000 would cover repairs to the 640-square-foot house. But the county requires that when more than 50% of a home is damaged, that it be completely rebuilt to meet modern storm-resiliency codes and — in her flood zone — on stilts. That would cost at least $200,000, money she doesn’t have.
She dreams of resettling in Key West or Homestead, a safer spot on the Florida mainland.
“I’d like to take the money and run,” Rittel said. “But I’ll have to buy something on stilts. I’m not buying anything on the ground down here ever again.”
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 220 news outlets to highlight climate change.
Statements On The IPCC’s New Special Report - The Pressure To take Action Is Enormous
Statements on the IPCC’s new Special Report “The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate” from Hans-Otto Pörtner and AWI Director Antje Boetius
Statements on the IPCC’s new Special Report “The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate” from Hans-Otto Pörtner and AWI Director Antje Boetius
Bremerhaven/Germany, 25 September 2019.
Today, in Monaco, the IPCC will present its new Special Report on the ocean and the Earth’s frozen regions. The report summarises observations of and projections on climate-based changes to ecosystems in the ocean, coastal, polar and alpine regions, describes the likely impacts of these changes for society and presents a range of options for adaptation. Over the past three years, 104 researchers from 36 countries have contributed to the report.
In the statements below, Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of the IPCC’s Working Group II, and AWI Director Prof Antje Boetius share their thoughts on its significance.
Drastic emissions reductions and an ambitious adaptation strategy could reduce risks
"The ocean and the cryosphere – the frozen regions of our planet – play an important part in the Earth system, and in all our lives. Though they may seem very distant to some people, in fact we all directly or indirectly depend on the functions provided by the ocean and cryosphere. The effects of climate change, which we can already see first-hand in our own country, reflect how our actions are reshaping the environment: temperatures are rising, both on land and at sea. The ocean is losing oxygen and becoming more acidic, with serious consequences for fragile ecosystems like coral reefs, and for our ability to feed the global population through fishing and aquaculture. Glaciers and ice sheets around the planet are melting, causing the sea level to rise. Low-lying coastal regions and islands are increasingly being flooded. At the same time, alpine regions now face growing risks, e.g. of landslides and avalanches, not to mention changes in precipitation, which also affect many regions downstream from them. The effects of these changes often hit people who are least responsible for them, and who hardly have the resources to respond to them.
Because the ocean and cryosphere are already reacting to the current carbon dioxide emissions, and these changes are both long-term and irreversible, far-reaching risks (e.g. extreme weather events and sea-level rise) can no longer be avoided – but their effects can be mitigated. We have the ability to assess these threats and technologies that can be used to dramatically reduce emissions and to support ambitious adaptation strategies. Yet the key is to create suitable framework conditions that will allow us to limit the changes in the ocean and cryosphere. In this way, we can preserve the vital ecosystems that provide the basis for all life.
The IPCC’s recently released Special Report “The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate” summarises observations of and projections on essential changes – from the snow-capped alpine peaks to the coastal regions and the ocean’s depths, from the polar regions to the tropics. It describes the consequences for ecosystems and for us humans, as well as adaptation strategies and paths to a climate-friendly, sustainable and secure future. In addition, the report highlights the benefits of limiting global warming to 2 degrees compared to the mean temperature prior to industrialization (the goal set by the governments in the Paris Agreement), or even to 1.5 degrees.
Accordingly, the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere represents a further valuable resource for the decision-makers attending the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit, and the Climate Week in New York, as well as the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Chile this December (COP25)."
Professor Hans-Otto Pörtner, AWI marine biologist and Co-Chair of Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
The Arctic as an early-warning system
“Our researchers’ observations and projections regarding changes in the ocean and cryosphere confirm what the report summarises: carbon dioxide emissions, which have continued to rise steadily around the globe, are producing concrete consequences for all life on Earth, including humankind. The fact that all of these trends have intensified is troubling and constitutes a call to take action more quickly and invest in adaptation strategies. In this regard, the Arctic region serves as an early-warning system – although regional changes can also shape global processes.”
Professor Antje Boetius, marine biologist and Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI)
The Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) conducts research in the Arctic, Antarctic and oceans of the high and mid-latitudes. It coordinates polar research in Germany and provides major infrastructure to the international scientific community, such as the research icebreaker Polarstern and stations in the Arctic and Antarctica. The Alfred Wegener Institute is one of the 19 research centers of the Helmholtz Association, the largest scientific organization in Germany.
Why Maldives Needs To Declare A State of Climate Emergency - IMMEDIATELY (PT. I)
As an apocalyptic future approaches with alarming speed, rather than give rise to action, many seem to have settled for apathetic outlook
As Maldives gears up for Climate Strike on Sep 20, the UN Climate Summit on Sep 21 and COP25 in Dec, the time is ripe for the nation's leaders to acknowledge the urgent climate crisis and rise to action. Part I of a II part mini-series on the Climate Crisis.
Why Maldives needs to declare a state of climate emergency - IMMEDIATELY (PT. I). IMAGE: JAUNA NAFIZ / THE EDITION
Rae Munavvar
19 September 2019
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as of right now, 11 percent of the world’s population is vulnerable to droughts, floods, heatwaves, extreme weather events and sea-level rise caused by climate change. As the state of the Earth worsens, in as little as 2-3 decades, 100 percent of Maldivians stand to lose their livelihoods, heritage and homelands… presumably in that order.
Most people are aware that Maldives, presenting little in the way of world-wide carbon emissions and one of the least contributors to global warming and climate change on this shared planet - is fated to be first in line for the repercussions, along with a further 800 million vulnerable people.
As an apocalyptic future approaches with alarming speed, rather than give rise to action, many seem to have settled for apathetic outlook. Though no longer ignorant, urgent discourse and mitigation have taken a backseat to idle post sharing.
Perhaps this hurdle can be blamed on human psychology, for historically, discussions about a possible end of days have never gone down well. However, donning ‘eco slogan’ tees and hashtag fuelled rants, though immensely satisfying, is sufficient no longer. Beach cleanups, exporting plastic waste for recycling or stocking government offices with recyclable gear though fantastic, are only a start. There is a larger message that needs to be addressed and delivered to the masses.
By confronting the difficult truth of climate change and accepting the inevitable call to arms, this low-lying country not only succeeds in owning its reality - Maldives is presented with an opportunity to set an example for the world, leading the fight. To quote Bristol councillor Carla Denyer, the woman responsible for bringing the emergency movement to England, "It is the first step to radical action."
Sure, ‘Green Ambassadors’ from Maldives have done a remarkable job of voicing out these concerns to the global community - but this is more about the average Amina and Ali coming to terms with the fact that the threat of climate change is an issue they will most likely have to deal with in their lifetime, and providing everyone the best chance at survival.
Coming together and presenting a united front may be the only leverage the nation has in demanding that larger, more powerful nations of the world accept their share of responsibility and join islanders on the battlegrounds.
Sands of Time
At the time of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, which provided the scientific input into the Paris Agreement, the goal was to maintain global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.
In 2018, IPCC shifted course and began advocating for temperatures to be kept below 1.5 degrees celsius, describing the difference as “a significantly lower risk of drought, floods, heatwaves and poverty” for hundreds of millions of people.
The document states, “without increased and urgent mitigation ambition in the coming years leading to a sharp decline in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, global warming will surpass 1.5°C in the following decades, leading to irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems, and crisis after crisis for the most vulnerable people and societies.”
Terrifyingly, IPCC’s 1.5 Special Report further emphasizes that presently, humans have only a 67 percent chance of reducing global temperatures below the 2 degree Celsius limit.
Data recorded in 2016’s Second National Communication of Maldives (NCM) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) also supports IPCC’s claims, noting “future climate projections indicate that the extreme flooding events are likely to become more frequent in the future with changing climate”.
NCM then goes on to declare, “despite the fact challenges, Maldives is determined to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change”. But how ready are we really?
Consider psychologist Abraham Maslow’s five levels of human needs, a theory most of us are familiar with to better comprehend the severity of today’s climate crisis, and the impact it has on the people of Maldives at the most basic levels.
1. Food
In the event of any extreme climate activity, let alone sea level rise, the country’s ability to both produce and store food will, without a doubt, be compromised. Similarly, as nearly 90 percent of the food consumed in the country is imported, any impact on food production in the source countries will also directly affect food security.
Food reserves in the capital city, as with the remaining 200 inhabited islands, are located in close proximity to the sea. As such, preparations for future storage needs are not in effect.
The race is on. For small island nations such as , winning the race against #ClimateChange is no longer a choice but a necessity for future existence. Time is running out and we need immediate #ClimateAction! #ClimateAction4Maldives @AkikoFujii1
On the subject of food production, environmentalists allege that agricultural centres like that of Thoddoo Island, are not pressured to farm sustainably and that simple measures such as utilizing rainwater for watering are not in place. Further, their unchecked profuse use of pesticides doesn’t just make the food dangerous to consume - it also contaminates groundwater and may leak into surrounding waters.
Fish and seafood are essential to the islanders’ diet. As such, changes in sea temperature and ocean acidity will affect fisheries. The issue of marine debris is also a concern, along with rising levels of untreated or improperly disposed sewage, which is the case for most islands. Though the expanding local tourism industry has encouraged cleanups, the wastewater situation has not benefited at all.
That’s not all. Microplastics have been discovered in the bodies of various species of fish and to account for dissolved toxins is nearly impossible. For a country that relishes concentrated fish products like ‘Rihaahukuru’ - this is far more than a footnote.
Aside from proper waste management and storage, adaptive measures for food could also include incentivizing other means of food production, for instance vertical farms, small-scale hydroponic farms and so forth. Harmful agricultural practices should be discouraged by taxes and bans.
Targeted awareness programs about the immediate impact of marine pollution could be conducted. A system where fishermen and boat crews could profit from fishing out waste from the ocean could be implemented.
2. Water
Certainly, water deserves to be ranked far higher than food as scientists estimate humans can go 3 weeks without food but less than 100 hours without water, that too in “average temperatures” and “without exposure to sunlight”, rendering the fact irrelevant to Maldives. However, the issue of water here is slightly murkier.
Most Maldivians have already noticed drastic changes to the usually predictable monsoon seasons. Sources from the MET Observatory confirmed that climate change has already begun to affect precipitation patterns in the Maldives.
According to NCM, overall decreasing trends in annual rainfall were observed over the 3 regions of Hanimaadhoo, Malé and Gan. The total number of rainfall days per year is also decreasing. Adding to the issue is that groundwater is hardly an option anymore; the freshwater lens used in our well water have become salinized and polluted in a majority of islands.
Another Male in creation? #ActOnClimate #ClimateStrikeMV #ClimateEmergency https://twitter.com/litmustimes/status/1174242550472945664 …
Replying to @AdamIshamMV and 10 others
Residents of Fuvahmulah need to question on the affects of their fresh water supply! Now all r supplied frm the island’s fresh water supply. All of which is flushed to the sea! This will deplete the island’s fresh water supply & affect the kilhis too.
See mariyam mohamed 's other Tweets
“Traditional rainfall patterns have changed over the last decade. If you’ve monitored precipitation or even asked elder locals to compare Hulhangu Moosun these days with the traditional Nakai Calendar, the difference is clear, “ revealed Sharafulla Thoha Hussain, technician at Maldives Climate Observatory based in Hanimaadhoo Island, Haa Alif Atoll.
Devoid of natural freshwater sources, the archipelago as a whole currently relies on desalination, a process that is heavily fossil fuel dependent. Even as resources deplete and prices rise, several alternatives are already on the market. Technology that allows for absorption of water from the atmosphere exists and there are forms of water extraction using clean energy that must be explored.
Furthermore, rather than abandoning traditional and more sustainable methods like the collection of rainwater, islands can be designed to capture heavy downpour. Instead of wasting water during showers and storms as happens now, this natural resource can and should be utilised.
3. Shelter
One of the most important factors to account for in this regard are rising global temperatures, after all, 17 of the 18 warmest years in the history of the planet took place after 2000. In the Maldives, NCM reveals temperatures are increasing in the capital city by approximately 0.3 °C per decade, although in this case the urbanization of the area bears most of the responsibility; however, the fact that the ‘replication of Male’ is a growing trend, makes it quite concerning.
Maldives, as vacation-goers often describe it, is a land of endless summers. But what was a blessing stands soon to become a curse - our asphalt and concrete homes will no longer be tolerable a few degrees later.
Cooling our homes uses up fossil fuels we will soon not be able to acquire. “One of the best championed answers is to examine ancestral resources and marry them with elements of modern tech to curate solutions with a smaller carbon footprint”, offered a Maldivian property developer.
Presently, 44% of all Maldivians and their homes, stand within 100m of the sea. Even for those settled further inland, nearly 80% of the nation is below 1.5 meters of mean sea level. In the event of a natural disaster people have nowhere to seek refuge.
To begin with, the building of high-standing homes, is a decent adaptive measure for low-lying islands as it would alleviate immediate threats of flooding. Presently, in most islands including the capital area, the majority of homes are based at ground level.
Finland’s answer was the introduction of floating villages six years ago and has had remarkable success. Equipped with energy-saving systems and technologies, prefabricated homes are designed to withstand extreme winds and wave conditions. Even if it means abandoning island ways of life, testing the far more resilient floating homes is something that must be considered.
Prior to that though, stands the protection of nature's own barricades - the mangroves. wetlands and coral reefs which together not only mitigate the effect of wave swells, tsunamis and storms, but also absorb 10 times more carbon from the atmosphere than tropical forests.
For example, another idea may be to test the Modular Artificial Reef Structure (MARS) introduced at Summer Island Resort, which was initially developed by Austrailian designers as a wave break, but in this case one that allows for water and sand movement thereby possibly preventing erosion, while also welcoming coral growth. There are many other promising projects to look into as well.
Environmental protection, public health & livelihoods are linked. Delayed action to protect the remaining parts of the mangrove , a clear violation of basic human rights, specially the rights of 400+ @DrHussainHassan @naeembe @hrw @hrcmv #SaveKulhudhuffushiKulhi
@AfaHusayn
4. Energy
Maldives has become extremely, unforgivably dependant on non renewable - as a single glance around the typical household or office building demonstrates.
As fuel prices climb, these lifestyles that have only just become accustomed to modern conveniences are set to become incredibly restricted, and fast. Heaters, coolers, inter-atoll travel, intra-atoll travel, cooking, learning - without energy normalcy in the island nation will need to be redefined, drastically. Soon even this article, may be far out of reach.
Renewable energy is the future; and in the long run, it will prove to be several times cheaper. In addition to halting the subsidization of fossil fuels and incentivizing clean energy, the government could commence initiatives tailored around projects for which the country has already served as a testing ground such as Swimsol’s Floating Solar Panels, Professor Tsumoru Shintake’s The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University Wave Energy Converter units (WEC-units), and more.
Frankly, few countries are better poised to enter a rapid fossil fuel phaseout or has more reason to actively seek out and begin testing, implementing and subsidizing clean energy alternatives, than Maldives.
5. Security
The issue of security is best described by Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid at the United Nations Security Council meeting on the impacts of climate-related disasters on international peace and security, this January.
He asked, “While we are still busy trying to decide which forum of the United Nations must address which aspect of climate change, in our countries across the world; lakes are drying up depriving fresh water to tens of millions of people. Unseasonal droughts are leaving millions of people homeless. Hunger and displacement are leading to conflicts. And entire nations are sinking under water. What is a bigger security risk than this?”
Nevertheless the country is yet to see such statements translate into action at home. The same disruptive unsustainable development continues, antagonizing and destroying the fragile ecosystems.
Intensifying climate events pose serious threats to the Maldives, as demonstrated by the devastating loss caused by the 2004 Tsunami, where development was set back decades.
I want a military that proactively strives to build our resilience and well prepared to tackle the #ClimateCrisis please @MNDF_Official @NDMAmv @presidencymv @mvpeoplesmajlis https://twitter.com/koamasfurolhi/status/1174497830011977730 …
Replying to @koamasfurolhi
What do you think is more important for us? A military that waits in anticipation of a foreign attack or a military that actively tries to increase resilience of islands and are prepared to manage disasters all across the country?
See Aisha Niyaz's other Tweets
Although Tsunami and Weather warning protocols are in place, if citizens fail to understand the gravity of the current climate situation, appropriate response will not follow. Indeed mitigation measures concerning security begins with informing people of the ‘undiluted’ truth.
6. Relationships
There’s no telling, really, how our human connection will suffer in the coming years. First there is the loss of culture and heritage. Next, few countries have a population as dispersed as the Maldives; and when damage extends to travel and communication, relationships will face immense stress.
Internet, which itself carries a large carbon footprint, has nevertheless improved the lives of Maldivians in ways that are hard to describe. Having to ration power will mean that digital lives will be one of the very first compromises Maldivians may need to sacrifice in favour of the essentials; security, energy, water, and food.
Can any of us recall what life before the world-wide-web was really like? Is being disconnected in that fashion something we even want to remember?
For ‘digital generations’ at least, this might be one of the most compelling arguments as to why Maldives needs to spend money researching and implementing clean energy solutions.
Devastation In Progress
For most of the innovations mentioned in each category, wide-scale applications are yet to be seen. What the country’s leaders are waiting for, is just as much a mystery.
Marine experts state that rise in ocean temperatures to levels causing serious and widespread coral bleaching was first recorded in 1988, followed by 1998, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 - it doesn’t take a genius to understand the incidence is increasing and fast. The latter three may not have been mass bleaching events, but effects are significant.
The IPCC report expresses high confidence that if global temperatures can be stabilized at a maximum of 1.5 degrees celsius, 70 - 90 percent of coral reefs will deteriorate. If these temperatures exceed the 2 degrees celcius mark the report calculates with ‘Very High Confidence’ that 99 percent of reefs will die. Of course if that happens, the human race will follow shortly after.
Surveys conducted over the last two decades lead to clear deductions that at least 80 percent of coral reefs in the Maldives, are already severely damaged. The tourism industry works overtime to create a facade of perfect isles - despite existing legislation that prohibits excavation of sand, destruction of marine habitats and so on. The constant ‘beach nourishment’ that occurs in resorts, unjustifiable development of harbours, newly reclaimed resorts and airports, removal of ‘Heylhifah’ (vegetation buffer zone) by guesthouses, all serve to exacerbate an environment already slipping into deep decline.
Plz dont narrow minded ur thinking of having a resort is enough! Yes, We need jobs, Q healthy facilities, Q education, reliable transpt, proper waste mgmt and so on.Y not invest on food security!? @ali20waheed@YasirLathyf @JamsheedMohame6 @gafoor2656 @Mraee12 @FitteyZ @edzyadam https://twitter.com/MoTmv/status/1170663206261383169 …
Minister @ali20waheed meets with respective Parliament Members; @gafoor_moosa, @FitteyZ, @YasirLathyf, @JamsheedMohame6 and @Mraee12 to discuss potential islands for resort development in Haa Dhaalu Atoll.
Environment Impact Assessments are necessitated and therefore are carried out to ensure minimal harm occurs. However, for in instance, most consultants agree requirements like silt curtains and sediments screens are hardly ever used, and without enforcement by EPA and authorities, developers do get away with ‘oceanic’ murder. One of the most important steps that needs to be taken is to ensure that EIA’s are seen as more than a rubber stamp of approval for business owners to skirt around.
In terms of waste management, islands and atolls have moved to ‘take the matter into their own hands’, announcing everything from ‘banning single-use plastics’ to ‘recycling and composting’. Unfortunately the truth of the matter is, plastic is still being used momentarily and discarded, recycling and composting are only conducted in very small proportions. Across the archipelago, waste is still being burned and toxic emissions freely released into the atmosphere, including at the infamous Thilafushi garbage island where even a decade ago, up to 330 tons of rubbish was collected daily.
The technology to incinerate waste using clean energy with zero emissions does exist, and has been utilized by many including Indian inventor Shanavas Sainulabdeen. So does means of turning waste into energy, which is especially well carried out in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Incineration Plant which turns trash to ash in 30 minutes. However, foreign sources have confirmed that the government has, on occasion, deemed investing in such innovations as too costly.
Arguably, the depletion of the Maldives’ natural resources, and the permanent depreciation of its marketable value is a price the country cannot afford to pay.
Continue to Part II...
Why Maldives needs to declare a state of climate emergency - IMMEDIATELY (PT. II)
Could Rooftop Gardens Save Our Cities From Climate Change?
Lucent, a 17-storey residential tower at trendy Newstead in inner-city Brisbane, is one of those, winning local, state and national design awards. The tower, completed in November 2017, included a 1,600 square metre rooftop area with expansive views over Brisbane
09-05-19
Rooftop gardens could save our cities from climate change, but archaic planning laws are holding back a green revolution.
Australian cities are heating up, with an alarming report this year finding temperature increases from climate change and urban growth will make Brisbane "a difficult place" to live by 2050.
Key points:
Rooftop gardens are considered a storey of a building, so it is not financially viable to have one as a garden instead of sellable space
Research shows rooftop gardens promote physical activity and psychological wellbeing and have a positive impact on air pollution, noise levels and temperature regulation
Town planners want the Brisbane City Council to legislate to enforce rooftop gardens in all new apartments
Scientists blame what is called the urban heat island effect, which means cities are hotter than nearby rural areas due to development.
But it is not too late to turn it around, and plants could be the solution.
Green rooftops could help to take the heat out of the city, but Brisbane's property developers and planners said local laws were holding them back.
Cities like Singapore and New York have long embraced sky gardens and while Brisbane is late to the garden party, there are dozens of developments in the pipeline that would use clever ways to provide greenspace, when room on the ground is at a premium.
In September 2018, then-Brisbane lord mayor Graham Quirk announced the Council would amend the Brisbane City Plan to formalise the Council's support for rooftop gardens and green spaces, but 12 months on, that had not happened.
Currently a rooftop garden is considered a storey of the building, so if a developer has planning permission for a certain number of storeys, it is not financially viable to have one as a garden instead of sellable space.
Developers hamstrung by poor planning laws
Brisbane town planner Mia Hickey said the majority of large-scale inner-city apartment developments in Brisbane wanted to incorporate rooftop spaces, but were hamstrung by the poor planning laws.
"There are definitely some developers who are shying away from adding rooftop gardens for this reason," she said.
"It's not a good look when they [council] said they were going to do this [change planning laws] and it hasn't been done."
Ms. Hickey said research showed rooftop gardens promoted physical activity, psychological wellbeing, and had a positive impact on air pollution, noise levels and temperature regulation.
"It's no longer just OK to put a half-shaded BBQ area up there with a little bit of grass," she said.
"We're now starting to see developments that incorporate resort-style amenities that are winning awards.
Newstead rooftop garden a 'sky retreat'
Lucent, a 17-storey residential tower at trendy Newstead in inner-city Brisbane, is one of those, winning local, state and national design awards.
The tower, completed in November 2017, included a 1,600 square metre rooftop area with expansive views over Brisbane.
The luxury development by Cavcorp described its rooftop garden as a "sky retreat" complete with "lifestyle-enhancing amenities".
It claims to have Australia's longest infinity pool, along with a detox sauna and spa, yoga lawn, Zen gardens and even a golf green on the rooftop.
With more families abandoning the suburbs in favour of inner-city living, Ms Hickey said even those on more restricted budgets were demanding rooftop garden space.
Consumers looking for the 'up-yard'
"It's just as important as the local school catchment," Ms Hickey said.
"It's no longer about the size of the backyard, but about the size and amenities of the rooftop, or as I like to call it — 'the up-yard'."
There are numerous inner-city apartment proposals with ambitious rooftop gardens on the drawing boards.
Cbus Property is building a 47-storey apartment block at 443 Queen Street in Brisbane's CBD.
Claiming to be Australia's first "subtropical-designed" building, construction is underway on the riverside development.
The building will have a "breathable facade" with gardens on every floor as well as on the rooftop, aiming to reduce energy consumption by up to 60 per cent.
At New Farm in Brisbane, the Maison project by Frank Developments will have cascading gardens on every floor of the proposed five-storey development.
The development, yet to receive Brisbane City Council (BCC) approval, claimed it would be one of the most heavily landscaped buildings in the city, with more than 86 per cent of the site to be planted, when the current council requirement was just 10 per cent.
Further afield, a Victorian property developer has plans for a "sustainable shopping centre" at Burwood in suburban Melbourne.
Frasers Property group is building a 2,000 square-metre urban farm on the shopping centre's rooftop, which it said is a first for Australia.
Failure to move quickly hampering rooftop landscaping
The Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) agreed the BCC's failure to move quickly is hampering rooftop landscaping in Queensland.
UDIA Qld CEO Kirsty Chessher-Brown said currently there was "really no incentive for our members to be able to do this — it's actually disincentivised".
"The current situation is that our members can provide communal space on rooftops, but the minute that any roof structure is added to that rooftop space, it's then considered to be an additional storey to the building.
"That then impacts on our members' ability to comply with acceptable rules for building heights.
"If our [UDIA] members do put a structure on the roof, which is incredibly important for our climate, we see our members lose a complete storey, which could obviously be habitable space."
She said these spaces provided "really critical opportunities for landscaping".
"People can provide community or productive gardens and the real lure is being able to reduce some of the heat-island affect, traditionally associated with built-up environments," she said.
Ms Chessher-Brown said there was also a need for further incentives for developers.
"The next step is to replicate other programs in place across the world including Singapore, where there's actually a program to encourage developers to consider greater landscaping and use of planting on rooftop spaces," she said.
Legislation needed for developers to do rooftop gardens
In 2009, Singapore introduced its Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises (LUSH) Program, which encouraged developers to provide green roofs in all new developments and gave financial incentives for those that went beyond the minimum requirements.
The Property Council of Australia (PCA) is more forgiving of the council for the delay.
Acting Queensland deputy executive director Nathan Percy said the PCA supported the action contained in the BCC Brisbane Future Blueprint to make it easier for new developments to include rooftop gardens.
"We are working with Brisbane City Council on the implementation of this action, but it is important to remember that planning amendments do take time," he said.
"As Brisbane grows, we need to ensure that we continue to deliver spaces that allow people to enjoy our subtropical climate and rooftop gardens are one way that we can achieve this."
In a statement, BCCs planning chairman, Matthew Bourke, acknowledged there was a need for rooftop gardens but admitted it would take until the end of the year to make changes.
"Brisbane is a great place to live, work and relax, and we are increasingly seeing residents and visitors enjoying the city's vistas and subtropical weather from the rooftops of inner-city dwellings," he said.
"Increasing green spaces means a healthier and more sustainable city and Brisbane City Council has proposed an amendment to make it easier to include rooftop gardens for new developments as part of its review of City Plan.
"Investigations, research and drafting of the amendment package is underway and Council plans to be able to send it to the State Government for review soon, before opening up the proposed amendment for public consultation in late 2019."
We're Barreling Towards Another Dust Bowl
In 1935, the Dust Bowl came to Washington—and if we don't change our ways, it could come back. A new report from the UN climate committee warns that much of the world risks the kind of land degradation that turned fertile farmland into desert during the 1930s
We Have To Fight Fast To Keep Our Soil From Slipping Away
August 19, 2019
In 1935, the Dust Bowl came to Washington—and if we don't change our ways, it could come back. A new report from the UN climate committee warns that much of the world risks the kind of land degradation that turned fertile farmland into desert during the 1930s. Luckily, this desolate stretch of history doesn't just serve as a warning. It also provides potential solutions.
The District of Columbia was an unlikely place for a dust storm. Though the Midwest had been shrouded in clouds of dust since 1932, the lawmakers discussing the Dust Bowl in March 1935 were more than 1,000 miles away from the disaster. Then, something uncanny happened: As lawmakers deliberated the very issue of how to stem a series of droughts and the erosion and catastrophic dust storms that followed, a literal cloud fell on the city. Soon, the capital's familiar marble monuments were covered in a layer of reddish dust. "A clay-colored veil hung before the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol and the Library of Congress," a reporter observed. That scenario may come to mind when you read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new Climate Change and Land Report, which details the ways humans have stripped the planet and calls for sustainable land management practices, many of which were developed in the wake of the Dirty Thirties.
If we continue to use land the way we do now, the report concludes, our species faces a grim future indeed. Humans directly affect more than 70 percent of Earth’s terrain, and it shows: Population growth, farming, and other land use have taken their toll, fueling rapid shifts in climate and threatening Earth’s ability to sustain both humans and itself. Land can only absorb 29 percent of humans’ total CO2 emissions per year. And desertification—the same kind of land degradation that caused dust to fly during the 1930s—further threatens Earth’s climate.
It's been called "the greatest environmental challenge of our time," and for good reason. In desertification, areas with scarce water get even less moisture, and irrigated farmland goes from fertile to desiccated. Climatic trends play a role, but humans' land management mistakes fuel desertification, too.
Severely eroded farmland during the Dust Bowl.USDA
The Dust Bowl is a classic example. White settlers poured onto the United States' Great Plains during the mid-19th century, spurred by free property the federal government offered in exchange for cultivation. The semiarid prairie was home to a variety of native grasses, but the notion that it could be converted into productive farmland was misguided. The would-be farmers had no idea that the region went through extended wet periods followed by drier ones. Local plants had adapted to survive, and settlers thought that the existence of moisture meant more would follow. They also believed that "rain follows the plow"—a long-abandoned theory that the presence of farmers and settlers could bring humidity to dry climates—and the maxim set them up for disaster.
"They removed windbreaks and trees to plant fields in a relatively semi-arid area that had been wet," says climatologist Marc Svoboda, who directs the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska. Then, during the 1920s, Great Plains farmers planted huge amounts of wheat in response to international demand. Investing in the drought-intolerant crop meant uprooting resilient prairie grasses, which had previously helped the soil survive dry seasons by storing moisture in their deep roots. "When the drought came, that landscape was much more vulnerable," Svoboda says.
Come it did, and with catastrophic results. Beginning in 1931, the region experienced a series of four major drought episodes considered the worst in the nation's history. Farmers weren't prepared for this, or for the erosion that followed. Failing crops left soil rootless and loose, leaving it vulnerable to high winds.
Soon, epic dust storms swept the region. The same tempest that blew through Washington, DC left 12 million pounds of dust in Chicago alone. A month later, one of the most severe storms of the era, nicknamed "Black Sunday," enveloped the Great Plains. It was 1,000 miles long, contained 300,000 tons of dust, and traveled up to 100 miles per hour. This weather didn't just affect the land: Farm animals choked on dust and suffocated. At least 7,000 people died from "dust pneumonia" as a result of breathing in the fine particulates, and countless more were driven from their homes and livelihoods by the endless, swirling dirt. The storms are also thought to have hastened the spread of measles and other infectious diseases. It was an environmental catastrophe—and one that humans had the power to sidestep.
A farmer's son in Cimarron County, Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era.Arthur Rothstein, for the Farm Security Administration
A farmer's son in Cimarron County, Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era.Arthur Rothstein, for the Farm Security Administration
The IPCC's latest predictions sound awfully familiar. The committee warns that ongoing soil degradation will hasten desertification, which can fuel climate change. When soil degrades, it can't trap as much carbon, releasing this greenhouse gas (along with nitrous oxide) into the atmosphere. That means a warmer climate, which means more droughts and still more desertification. Resource-intensive uses of land, like massive farming operations, will cause water scarcity and degrade the soil—a vicious cycle like the one farmers faced during the Dust Bowl. During that event, human-induced land degradation not only led to dust storms, but made the droughts worse.
But the Dust Bowl might offer more than a warning. The event actually led to sensible land management practices that are still used today, says Charles Rice, a distinguished professor in Kansas State University's department of agronomy. In the wake of the Dust Bowl, he explains, the concept of soil conservation—protecting soil's fertility and keeping it from eroding—finally got traction in the United States.
Soil conservation has three guiding principles, he explains: don't till the soil, keep it covered, and keep crops diverse. Reduced tillage preserves the root pathways forged by preexisting plants. Those paths act like pores, allowing the ground to store water for use in dry times and soak it up more effectively during floods. Cover crops, like alfalfa, clover, and sorghum, keep the soil loose after a cash crop has been harvested. When cover crops become part of the soil during preparation for a crop like corn or wheat, they increase soil moisture and provide larger yields. Since they keep a field's precious soil covered and preserve its pores, cover crops also prevent earth from becoming so fine it turns into dust. Planting diversely prevents the nutrient drain that occurs when the same crops grow season after season. Rotating through different varieties acts more like a multivitamin, adding a variety of nutrients to the soil over time. Drought-resistant crops can step in occasionally to save water, and use the water that's already in the soil more efficiently.
Farmers can also conserve their soil by diversifying their farmland's portfolio, notes Rice. They might plant several kinds of crops in one area and keep livestock on another, so that drought doesn't put the entire swath of soil at risk.
Those post-Dust-Bowl practices have paid off. “Over time, we got better fertility and crops that have been bred for more drought tolerance,” says Rice. The United States’ investment in soil conservation has made the land more resilient than it was before the days of dust pneumonia.
But that doesn't mean it can't happen again. Rice warns that 21st-century farmers have to do more than just follow the basic tenets of soil conservation if they want to stave off further desertification. Landowners must rethink their approach to crops, profits, and technology. By sharing data and creating advanced computer models, he says, farmers could use better drought forecasting to dictate which crops they choose. Dust Bowl-era farmers didn't have computers to help them adapt.
Rice looks forward to a future where high-tech sensors help provide real-time data about soil moisture, and robots that water just the individual plants in need of moisture instead of soaking entire fields. "I guess I'm an optimist," he says. "The right investments could really help reduce desertification and provide some resilience to those Dust Bowl type events."
Despite a heaping dose of bad news about humanity’s use of land, the IPCC strikes an optimistic note, too. Not only can we prevent future desertification, but we can take the action required to do so in the near-term—if we’re willing to acknowledge the dust clouds ahead.
Lead photo: Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas in 1935.NOAA George E. Marsh Album
Eindhoven: ‘We Are Ahead In The Field of Urban Greening’.
Eindhoven is one of the three demonstration cities participating in the European climate research project that will be experimenting for five years with projects which make the city climate-adaptive using nature-based solution
Uitzicht over de binnenstad van Eindhoven
Posted by Lucette Mascini | Aug 24, 2019 | Tags: Brabant, demonstration cities, Eindhoven, EU, TU/e
Eindhoven is one of the three demonstration cities participating in the European climate research project that will be experimenting for five years with projects which make the city climate-adaptive using nature-based solutions. The aim is for other cities to be able to apply any successful results in their own municipalities. We asked Luuk Postmes, project leader from the municipality of Eindhoven, which of these projects are being implemented.
You are leading the project on behalf of the municipality of Eindhoven. What does your job involve precisely?
“As a civil servant working on urban water matters for the municipality of Eindhoven, I am both a project leader and an advisor. That covers the sewage system, the underground water and the surface water. As a result of the changing climate, we have to deal with drought, torrential rain and extreme heat stress. The question is: how do you deal with all of this? Greenery is a solution for many climate problems. Greenery can be used to cool the city. In turn, greenery is also dependent on water. Since this project is about climate adaptation, I have become the leader of this European project for the municipality of Eindhoven. The De Dommel WaterBoard and the province are also indirectly involved. But they are not a partners in the project. Eindhoven University of Technology is however.”
Project leader Luuk Postmes from the Eindhoven council
In what way is TU Eindhoven involved?
This is due to the participation of Lighthouse [a division of TU Eindhoven that specializes in sharing smart urban solutions, ed.], which is led by Rianne Valkenburg and Elke den Ouden. They are responsible for drawing up roadmaps for the process that should make the city more climate-proof. They also work together with the Following Cities as part of the EU project and are developing a vision for the future in this area.
Why is Eindhoven a demonstration city and other cities are called ‘Following Cities’?
“We [the three demonstration cities of Eindhoven, Tampere and Genoa, ed.] had been working for some time on making the city climate more adaptive, among other things by making it greener. The Following Cities of the EU project – Stavanger, Cannes, Prague, Castellon, Başakşehir – are a bit further along in this trajectory. They are keeping an eye on things with us.”
Why is Eindhoven participating in this experiment?
“The subject resonates very well with what we are doing in Eindhoven. If such a European project is of interest to us, we will apply for it and make a proposal. Then it remains to be seen whether it will be selected.
Which projects is Eindhoven currently carrying out?
“Some projects have already been concluded. We are still working on others. We have arranged green spaces in several streets because these were completely paved. This is how we tackled the Wagenstraat and the Bilderdijkstraat. By using less pavement, less water is channeled into the sewerage system. For instance, we are working on greening the Vestdijk. This involves looking at different types of vegetation. We are working on the design of a greener Clausplein, which is currently completely paved over. The Victoria Park is already located at the back of a former Philips building nicknamed the Witte Dame on Clausplein. The Gender river will come through there the back of there as well. The area will have a park-like layout where residents will be able to enjoy the peace and quiet and the greenery around them. We are also experimenting with greenery that can be mowed and which has a positive effect on biodiversity. Another method for increasing biodiversity is to mow the grass only once a year. This way you get tall grass that attracts insects and the subsoil is better able to absorb water. What you see is that if you mow less often, there will also be more and more different types of flowers and shrubs. You can see this happening on Parklaan, for example.”
But is that innovative?
“This is something that we, as a city, are pioneering. Other cities are following us. You can see in some foreign cities that they are often paved over an incredible amount. Everything is sealed with stones, concrete or asphalt. You can even see that when there is a tree on the pavement, the ground around it is completely covered in asphalt all the way up to the trunk. In Eindhoven we are looking for the best ways to make the city greener. What kind of plants should you choose? Should you choose plants that are better able to withstand drought? Or should we water plants when there is a prolonged drought? Are there any possible changes that can be made in their management that will help them cope with climate change and which will increase biodiversity? We try to answer these kinds of questions. We are also investigating how we could create more green space in places where there is limited space. One example is Eindhoven city center. It will be redeveloped in the next few years with more green space. We are trying in particular to encourage private-sector initiatives.”
What problems will these projects resolve?
“Initially, the disruption caused by heavy rain will be reduced. We will automatically be able to improve biodiversity by opting for a greener approach. That’ s a bonus for this project.”
How much money is the EU investing in it?
“The total budget is more than 10 million euros. Each of the three demonstration cities will receive approximately 1.7 million euros. The rest of the money will go to the other partners, including the Following Cities.”
The EU wants the results of the projects to be quantifiable. How are you going to measure them?
” It is still a struggle to figure it all out. But some results are fairly easy to measure. You are able to count how many species of bees and butterflies that have been added to a project site. Along with what the distance is between residents and green spaces and how many cool, green spaces have been added to the city. I have made a proposal to measure the heat stress sensitivity in the city using satellite images. In order to measure the effect on water management, we measure the soil infiltration capacity of areas with long grass. We compare the rates with those of areas where the grass is shorter. It turns out that the lawnmower compresses the subsoil. Consequently, water seeps into the ground less quickly if the grass is short, making it more difficult for it to soak into the soil.”
When will the project be finished?
“We have about three years for the implementation of the projects and two years for the monitoring. However, we won’t be able to achieve that for all of these projects. The main reason for this is that they conflict with the planning of other projects and processes. You can’t overhaul the entire city center all at once. The process may therefore take longer as a result.”
What are they doing in Tampere and Genua?
“In Tampere, Finland, they are focusing on two housing projects, one of which is on a former industrial estate. The most important focus point here is maintaining the water quality of the surrounding lakes. They have to take the shorter days and the lower temperatures in winter into account more. One experiment concerned the purification of water through the use of algae. The question was whether this would also work at those extremely low temperatures during winter. Which is what did transpire. The experiment was a success. In addition, they are also conducting experiments involving the construction of green roofs. In Genoa, Italy, they are converting an old barracks site into a park-like environment where you will be able to stay and enjoy leisure activities. In particular, they are looking at the use of greenery as a means of regulating water management.”
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NEXTEDEN-ISS: Substantial vegetable harvest in Antarctica
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucette Mascini
EDEN-ISS: Substantial Vegetable Harvest In Antarctica
“In just nine and a half months, we produced a total of 268 kilograms of food on just 12.5 square meters, including 67 kilograms of cucumbers, 117 kilograms of lettuce and 50 kilograms of tomatoes.”
EDEN-ISS ©Hanno Müller, AWI
Posted by Almut Otto | Aug 24, 2019 | Tags: Antarctic Neumayer III Station, Antarctica, DLR, greenhouses
No, luckily the climate in Antarctica is still inhospitable. And this is precisely why the German Aerospace Center (DLR) set up the EDEN-ISS greenhouse there in 2018. This is because food production of the future and future space missions are being researched in the immediate vicinity of the German Antarctic Neumayer III Station. In the meantime, the winter crew from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), including DLR researcher Dr Paul Zabel, has spent a year surrounded by constant ice. The team presented the results on 23 August: There was an unexpectedly rich harvest. According to Zabel:
“In just nine and a half months, we produced a total of 268 kilograms of food on just 12.5 square meters, including 67 kilograms of cucumbers, 117 kilograms of lettuce and 50 kilograms of tomatoes.”
EDEN-ISS ©Hanno Müller, AWI
Before his trip, by the way, Zabel had been smart enough to look into artificial vegetable cultivation in Dutch greenhouses. Zabel adds:
“The taste of the fresh vegetables and their smell left a lasting impression on the winter crew and had a visibly positive effect on the team’s mood throughout the long period of isolation.
A correlation that is now also being researched from a psychological perspective.
Lower energy consumption than expected
Additionally, the scientists were surprised that they needed much less energy than they had initially expected. The average power consumption during the analog Antarctic mission was 0.8 kilowatts per square meter of cultivated area. It was consequently less than half as much as previously assumed for aerospace greenhouses, which were estimated at 2.1 kilowatts per square meter.
“This is an important aspect for a subsequent space venture and gives us confidence about the future of this idea”.
… says Project Manager Dr. Daniel Schubert from the DLR Institute of Space Systems. Aside from that, he stresses the potential and useful addition to space food that can be supplied by the earth:
“In one year in the Antarctic we have seen very clearly how enough food can be produced in a very small space in order to supplement the food of a crew of six by a third with freshly grown food.”
High workload should be reduced
Notwithstanding this, the researchers still see some potential for development. Because in order to save valuable astronaut time, the amount of work required for support and maintenance has to be significantly reduced in the future. Zabel needed an average of three to four hours a day in order to cultivate the plants:
” I spent about two thirds of my time operating and maintaining the greenhouse technology, another third on sowing, harvesting and maintenance. In the future, a space greenhouse needs to significantly reduce the amount of an astronaut’s valuable time.”
On top of that, the time required for experiments was about four to five hours per day. The aeroponic cultivation system, i.e. nutrient solution without soil, enabled the plants to flourish successfully. Some pumps caused problems in the intervening period and the biofilm in the nutrient tanks were unexpectedly high, yet these problems could be remedied.
New EDEN-ISS designed for the Falcon 9 rocket
Based on the results and experiences of the EDEN-ISS project, a new design concept for a space greenhouse has now been developed. This greenhouse is fairly compact in its design so that it can be launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. At the same time, it is expandable and large enough to provide sufficient food for the astronauts on the moon or on Mars. “The area used for cultivation is around 30 square meters, almost three times the size of the Antarctic greenhouse container. Using this system, around 90 kilograms of fresh food could be grown per month, which corresponds to half a kilogram of fresh vegetables per day and per astronaut if six astronauts are present,” Schubert explains.
The concept may also be combined with a biofilter system (C.R.O.P.). Its purpose is to produce a fertilizer solution for plant cultivation that is able to be utilized from biowaste and urine directly. This makes the greenhouse concept almost a fully bio-regenerative life support system for future habitats. Prof. Hansjörg Dittus, DLR Executive Board member responsible for space research and technology, elaborates further:
“The newly proposed concept for a space greenhouse is an invaluable foundation on which we intend to further expand our research work.”
EDEN-ISS is open to research teams worldwide
Following Paul Zabel’s return to Germany, the Antarctic greenhouse was initially in “sleep mode”. Previously, the DLR team had maintained all systems on site in January 2019 and completely overhauled the container. The Bremen researchers then woke the system up from its sleep at the beginning of May using a remote control system and powered it up again. A seed sown at an earlier stage began to flourish.
“This step served to test another space scenario. Because a provisional greenhouse is expected to arrive before the astronauts and ideally start its operation remotely.
… DLR researcher Schubert explains and he adds: “The test run was a complete success. Now the current AWI winter crew is continuing to operate the greenhouse with strong support from the Bremen Control Center, from where we monitor as much as we possibly can from a distance. The procedures developed last year are currently proving their worth in minimizing the crew’s workload and simplifying procedures as far as practicable”.
The greenhouse is also now available to various research groups worldwide who are interested in conducting plant cultivation experiments in the Antarctic.
“As one of the first new collaboration partners, the American space agency NASA has already sent us original NASA salad seeds, which are also cultivated on the International Space Station ISS and now thrive here in Antarctica,” Schubert adds.
Findings are interesting for global food production
The frozen continent of Antarctica is one of the most exciting research regions in the world. “It is primarily here that we gather data on global climate change and Antarctic biodiversity. However, the greenhouse is an excellent example of how we can conduct research at Neumayer Station III on other important questions for the future. After all, we have a lot in common with space travel when we travel to regions that are hostile to humans in order to gain new insights. At the same time, the permanent supply of fresh fruit and vegetables has a very positive side effect on our winter crew this year once again,” says Prof. Antje Boetius, Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, who, during her stay at the station, was able to convince herself of the wonderful flavor of a juicy giant radish from the greenhouse. The cultivation of vegetables is consequently also interesting for future missions by the research icebreaker Polarstern.
Moreover, global food production is one of the central challenges facing society in the 21st century. An ever-increasing world population and the simultaneous upheavals caused by climate change call for new ways of cultivating crops even in climatically unfavorable regions. A self-contained greenhouse enables harvests that are independent of weather, sun and season, as well as lower water consumption and the elimination of pesticides and insecticides for deserts and regions with low temperatures, as well as for space missions to the moon and to Mars. In the EDEN-ISS project, such a model greenhouse for the future is undergoing long-term testing under extreme Antarctic conditions.
EDEN-ISS partners
EDEN-ISS is developed by DLR in cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) as part of a winter mission at the German Neumayer Station III in Antarctica. Numerous other international partners are working together as part of a research consortium under the leadership of DLR with the aim of ensuring that the Antarctic greenhouse functions properly. These include Wageningen University and Research (Netherlands), Airbus Defense and Space (Germany), LIQUIFER Systems Group (Austria), National Research Council (Italy), University of Guelph (Canada), Enginsoft (Italy), Thales Alenia Space Italia (Italy), AeroCosmo (Italy), Heliospectra (Sweden), Limerick Institute of Technology (Ireland), Telespazio (Italy) and the University of Florida (USA). The project is funded by the European Research Framework Program Horizon 2020 under project number 636501.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Almut Otto
Almut Otto is a writer and has over 30 years of know-how in the communications industry. She learned the trade of journalism from scratch in a daily newspaper and in a special interest magazine. After studying communication sciences in Munich, she worked as an international PR manager in the textile, shoe, outdoor and IT industries for a long time. For some years now, she has been concentrating more on her journalistic background. As a passionate outdoor and water sports enthusiast - her hobbies include windsurfing, kitesurfing, SUP boarding, sailing and snowboarding - she is particularly interested in keeping the oceans clean and shaping a sustainable future. In addition, she is always fascinated by the latest developments from the world's hardware and software laboratories.
Climate Change And Land An IPCC Special Report
The IPCC approved and accepted Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems at its 50th Session held on 2 – 7 August 2019
Climate Change And Land Report
An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems
Download report
The IPCC approved and accepted Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems at its 50th Session held on 2 – 7 August 2019. The approved Summary for Policymakers (SPM) was presented at a press conference on 8 August 2019.
Press Release: Land is a Critical Resource, IPCC report says ( Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish)
Presentation (6.5 MB)
Background
At its 43rd Session (Nairobi, Kenya, 11 – 13 April 2016), the IPCC Panel decided to prepare a special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.
Experts met on 13 – 17 February 2017 in Dublin, Ireland to prepare a draft outline for the report.
At its 45th Session (Guadalajara, Mexico, 28 – 31 March 2017), the Panel approved the outline for Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.
The Special Report was developed under the joint scientific leadership of Working Groups I, II, III in cooperation with the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, and supported by the Working Group III Technical Support Unit.
Authors and Review Editors
107 experts from 52 countries were selected as Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors – who are working on each individual chapter – and Review Editors, who ensured that comments by experts and governments were given appropriate consideration as the report developed.
40% of the Coordinating Lead Authors are women. 53% of the authors are from developing countries, making this the first IPCC report to have more authors from developing countries than from developed countries. The full list of Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors and Review Editors is here.
A call for nomination of authors was sent to governments, observer organizations and IPCC Bureau Members on 5 April 2017. Graphics that provide background information about the nominees are available here
Lead Author Meetings
First Lead Author Meeting: Oslo, Norway, 16 – 20 October 2017
Second Lead Author Meeting: Christchurch, New Zealand, 26 – 30 March 2018
Third Lead Author Meeting: Dublin, Ireland, 3 – 7 September 2018
Fourth Lead Author Meeting: Cali, Colombia, 11 – 15 February 2019
Pre-Scoping
The Steering Committee for the Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems circulated a questionnaire to IPCC Focal Points and Observer Organizations ahead of the Scoping Meeting in February 2017 to get input on the structure and contents of the report. You can download the questionnaire and stakeholder consultation report here.
Scoping
A scoping meeting for the Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems was held on 13 – 17 February 2017 in Dublin, Ireland. The meeting resulted in a draft scoping paper describing the objectives and an annotated outline of the Special Report as well as the process and timeline for its preparation.
All the details of the scoping meeting are available in the scoping meeting report.
Adopted outline – (The dates of the 1st Lead Author Meeting have been corrected to read 16-20 October 2017)
Steering Committee
List of expertise
Scoping meeting programme
Background report for the scoping meeting
List of participants
Questionnaire and stakeholder consultation report
Timeline
Second Lead Author Meeting 26-30 March 2018
Expert review of First Order Draft Deadline 5 August 11 June-5 August 2018
Third Lead Author Meeting 3-7 September 2018
Literature deadline : Literature for consideration by report authors must be submitted to publishers
by this date 28 October 2018
Expert and Government review of Second Order Draft 19 November-14 January 2018-19
Fourth Lead Author Meeting 11-16 February 2019
SPM drafting workshop 20-21 March 2019
Literature deadline :Literature for consideration by report authors must be accepted for publication
by this date 7 April 2019
Final Government distribution 29 April-19 June 2019 Approval Plenary Joint WGI-II-III session 2-6 August 2019
Download PDF here.
Graphics
Graphics and statistical reports concerning the initial nominations and shortlisting of each stage are available in the public portal. Statistical reports include nominations by:
Nominations by Date
Citizenship
Gender and Region
Graduated Year
Observer Organizations
Nominating Countries
Previous IPCC Experience
Distribution by Region and Country
Regional Expertise
Sectors
Statistics
and more
Relevant Links
Adopted outline – (The dates of the 1st Lead Author Meeting have been corrected to read 16-20 October 2017)
IPCC-XLV/Doc. 7 – Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Products – Outline of the Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems
IPCC-XLV/INF. 7 – Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) products – Outline of the Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems
IPCC-XLIII/INF. 7: Special Reports – Proposed themes for Special Reports during the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) cycle
IPCC-XLIII/INF. 8: Special Reports Commentary from the Co-chairs of Working Groups I, II and III on each of the proposals for Special Reports contained in document IPCC-XLIII/INF. 7
IPCC-XLIII/INF. 9: Special Reports – Commentary from the Co-Chairs of Working Groups I, II and III on clusters of proposals for Special Reports contained in document IPCC-XLIII/INF. 7
IPCC-XLIII/INF. 19: Sixth Assessment Report Products – Information document
Climate Change Threatens The World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns
The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself
Cattle grazing outside Sokoto, Nigeria, where large-scale farming is in conflict with local communities. Credit Credit Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Aug. 8, 2019
The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.
Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior. Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.
“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr. McElweesaid. “What some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
The summary was released Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists convened by the United Nations that pulls together a wide range of existing research to help governments understand climate change and make policy decisions. The I.P.C.C. is writing a series of climate reports, including one last year on the disastrous consequences if the planet’s temperature rises just 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levels, as well as an upcoming report on the state of the world’s oceans.
Some authors also suggested that food shortages are likely to affect poorer parts of the world far more than richer ones. That could increase a flow of immigration that is already redefining politics in North America, Europe and other parts of the world.
“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”
Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change.
Winnowing wheat at a grain market in Amritsar, India.Credit Raminder Pal Singh/EPA, via Shutterstock
Harvesting in Xinjiang, northwest China.Credit China Daily/Reuters
Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.
Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a greenhouse gas put there mainly by the burning of fossil fuels — will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock.
Those changes threaten to exceed the ability of the agriculture industry to adapt.
In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas, among other things.
Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.
“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,” said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an antipoverty advocacy organization.
In addition, the researchers said, even as climate change makes agriculture more difficult, agriculture itself is also exacerbating climate change.
The report said that activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the planet. Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline.
And the emission of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, who is familiar with the report. (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)
An ethanol refinery in Tianjin, China.CreditChina Stringer Network/Reuters
A cattle market in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditFlorian Plaucheur/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Similarly, cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon.
Since 1961 methane emissions from ruminant livestock, which includes cows as well as sheep, buffalo and goats, have significantly increased, according to the report. And each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars.
Overall, the report says there is still time to address the threats by making the food system more efficient. The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade. They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted.
Read more about food and climate change
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Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change
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But protecting the food supply and cutting greenhouse emissions can also come into conflict with each other, forcing hard choices.
For instance, the widespread use of strategies such as bioenergy — like growing corn to produce ethanol — could lead to the creation of new deserts or other land degradation, the authors said. The same is true for planting large numbers of trees (something often cited as a powerful strategy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), which can push crops and livestock onto less productive land.
Planting as many trees as possible would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about nine gigatons each year, according to Pamela McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and one of the report’s lead authors. But it would also increase food prices as much as 80 percent by 2050.
“We cannot plant trees to get ourselves out of the problem that we’re in,” Dr. McElwee said. “The trade-offs that would keep us below 1.5 degrees, we’re not talking about them. We’re not ready to confront them yet.”
Rice cultivation outside Prayagraj, India.CreditRajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press
Flooded farms near Craig, Mo.CreditScott Olson/Getty Images
Preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is likely to require both the widespread planting of trees as well as “substantial” bioenergy to help reduce the use of fossil fuels, the report finds. And if temperatures increase more than that, the pressure on food production will increase as well, creating a vicious circle.
“Above 2 degrees of global warming there could be an increase of 100 million or more of the population at risk of hunger,” Edouard Davin, a researcher at ETH Zurich and an author of the report, said by email. “We need to act quickly.”
The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights. And for the first time, the I.P.C.C. cited indigenous people and their knowledge of land stewardship as resources to be tapped. “Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation,” the report’s authors wrote.
It comes at a time when indigenous people are currently under threat. According to a report released this year by the nonprofit organization Global Witness, which looks at the links between conflicts and environmental resources, an average of three people were killed per week defending their land in 2018, with more than half of them killed in Latin America.
Overall, the report said that the longer policymakers wait, the harder it will be to prevent a global crisis. “Acting now may avert or reduce risks and losses, and generate benefits to society,” the authors wrote. Waiting to cut emissions, on the other hand, risks “irreversible loss in land ecosystem functions and services required for food, health, habitable settlements and production.”
For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.
Correction: Aug. 9, 2019
An earlier version of this article misquoted and misattributed comments about proposals to address a possible food crisis. Those comments were made by Pamela McElwee, not Cynthia Rosenzweig. In addition, part of the quote was rendered incorrectly. Dr. McElwee said, “What some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.” She did not say, “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
Christopher Flavelle covers climate adaptation, focusing on how people, governments and businesses respond to the effects of global warming. @cflav
Planting The Seeds For Dramatic Changes In Agriculture
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released an important report titled “Climate Change and Land,” which chronicled the impact the agricultural industry is having on climate change
August 15, 2019
marsraw/Pixabay
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released an important report titled “Climate Change and Land,” which chronicled the impact the agricultural industry is having on climate change. Demonstrating the significance of that report, Alan Sano, a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Farmers Don’t Need to Read the Science. We Are Living It.”
But what is most interesting about the IPCC’s report is that they assume that traditional farming practices can be modified to address the crisis we face. Their recommendations are mostly focused on dealing with the fact that “global food production is now thought to be responsible for up to 37% of greenhouse gas emissions.” But there are other issues that make our traditional approach to farming unsustainable.
The global population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050.
Every hour, we lose 175 acres of farmland to real estate development.
A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year.
Scientists say that the earth has lost a third of its arable land over the last 40 years.
A quarter of humanity faces a looming water crisis.
Agriculture accounts for about 70% of global water withdrawals.
Nitrate from agriculture is now the most common chemical contaminant in the world’s groundwater aquifers.
Those are just some of the reasons why those searching for a sustainable solution are exploring the alternative of hydroponics—specifically with something that has come to be known as “vertical farming.”
Rick LeBlanc identified the additional benefits of vertical farming, including the fact that it “allows us to produce more crops from the same square footage of growing area.” For example, “1 acre of an indoor area offers equivalent production to at least 4-6 acres of outdoor capacity,” while using 70-95 percent less water than traditional farming.
As Danny Danko explains, “hydroponic cultivation — the growing of plants without soil — is a science as ancient as the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon and as modern as a future NASA mission to Mars.” It has even played a role in feeding U.S. troops since World War II.
During World War II, American troops overseas grew vegetables hydroponicaly to ease the burden of transporting perishable food to barren islands in the Pacific Theater and the arid regions of the Middle East…
The military kept growing hydro long after WWII, as Lt. Col. Marcus E. Cooper, Quartermaster, 1st Cavalry Division reported during the Korean War, “While we were in Kumchon we began to receive our first shipments of fresh vegetables. These were airlifted from the hydroponic farms in Japan. We had a standing priority on fresh foods for the hospital, then for the front-line troops. These vegetables were a real morale-builder.”
LeBlanc points out that the biggest downside to vertical farming right now is financial feasibility, due to the high capital costs associated with start-up. But he notes that “the financial situation is changing, however, as the industry matures and technologies improve.” That is where the federal government could play a huge role, similar to what was accomplished with renewable energy by the stimulus package, as described by Michael Grunwald.
Obama promised that he would double renewable power generation during his first term, and he did. In 2008, people had the sense that renewable energy was a tiny industry in the United States. What they forget is it was a tiny dead industry — because these wind and solar projects were essentially financed through tax credits, which required people with tax liability, and everybody had lost money, so nobody needed [the tax credits]. By changing those to a cash grant, it instantly unlocked this industry.
Any so-called “Green New Deal” will need to provide seed money (pun intended) to explore dramatic changes to how we think about agriculture and farming. The potential we’ve already seen from hydroponics and vertical farming could lead us in that direction.
We Need To Change Our Farming & Eating Habits Or Face 'Catastrophic' Global Warming Says UN
When it comes to global warming, it's not just logging and pollution that's making things worse. It's also that our everyday lifestyles are wasteful. Now the UN says if we don't get it together and change our diets, we could be in for catastrophic levels of global warming
Gwyn D'Mello Aug 08, 2019
When it comes to global warming, it's not just logging and pollution that's making things worse. It's also that our everyday lifestyles are wasteful.
Now the UN says if we don't get it together and change our diets, we could be in for catastrophic levels of global warming.
IMAGES COURTESY: REUTERS
This is the organisation's first comprehensive on the link between climate change and human land usage. It suggests that we need to change our diets to avoid food waste, and also adopt more sustainable means of farming, in order to tackle climate change.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that human activity has caused significant land degradation, deforestation and destruction of natural habitats. All of these effects together have resulted in a significant amount of carbon dioxide being released from the soil and into the atmosphere.
The report says that we need to adopt diets with more plant-based foods such as grains, nuts, fruit, and beans, as well as animal-based food produced with low greenhouse gas emissions.
Until now, the land has been responsible for absorbing a lot of carbon dioxide, thanks to photosynthesis in plants and the like. Cutting down all those trees, plus other climate-change effects like wildfires and desertification has resulted in all that land now releasing at least a third of all greenhouse gases into the air.
"This is a perfect storm. Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency," said Professor David Reay from the University of Edinburgh. "Crop yields are already being hit hard by climate change, staples like wheat, maize and rice are all at risk. The global web that is our food system means that impacts on farms thousands of miles away ripple right back to our own dinner plates."
"Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat."
The report indicates that the Earth's soil now holds only about one percent of the planet's total carbon, as opposed to the seven percent they earlier held. The solution to this problem, the UN says, is to immediately stop deforestation, and stop degrading the soil with exploitative farming methods.
We also need to diversify our farming to avoid leaching the soil of its nutrients. Farmers need to instead start relying on a mix of farming a mix of crop, as well as raising livestock, in order to allow the land to be more resilient to the effects of climate change.
For instance, that could mean mixing banana plantations with coffee. The former provides shade to the latter, and the mix of crops allows the farmer to be less reliant on a single crop. And the key to promoting this experts say is to first and foremost end subsidies on big single crops like corn and sugarcane.