Asia-Pacific Analysis: Climate Change And Agriculture

SciDev.Net - Crispin Maslog

Copyright: Andrew McConnell / Panos

Summary

• Changed weather patterns make farmers confused when to plant or harvest
• Farmers urged to 'adjust, get wiser and practise climate-smart agriculture'
• Projects demonstrate ecosystem interaction with farms and communities

The older folks among us have noticed that typhoons and hurricanes have come more frequently, are more destructive and no longer follow the seasons.
In the old days, for example, the typhoon season in South-East Asia usually started in July and ended in September. Nowadays, the most powerful ones are in the last two months of the year and they come even in the first half of the year.
Why? Scientists say that this is because of climate change. Climate change affects rainfall patterns, storms and droughts, growing seasons, humidity and sea level.
Farmers who depend on the rains to water their crops are not sure now when to plant or harvest. The winds and rains have become more severe. A few areas might even get cooler than warmer and vice versa.

Agriculture link to climate change
"Agriculture and climate change are closely linked," agriculture scientist Julian Gonsalves tells SciDev.Net. "Agriculture is part of the climate change problem. However, it is also part of the solution, offering many opportunities for mitigating GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions."
Gonsalves, senior advisor at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), adds: "The "agriculture sector is expected to suffer the most serious impacts of climate change, and food security, nutrition and livelihoods will be affected if we don't act soon."
It is time, therefore, that farmers adjust, get wiser and practise climate-smart agriculture (CSA). Climate-smart agriculture, Gonsalves says, can be simply understood as environment-friendly and sustainable agriculture that takes into consideration climate variability and change factors.
Gonsalves heads an international research action project in the Philippines and Vietnam on scaling up community adaptation and CSA. The project site in the Philippines is in Guinayangan, Quezon, a seacoast and farming community of 40,000 where the local government is involved.

Thrusts of climate-smart agriculture
The main thrusts of CSA are to increase agriculture productivity and income in a sustainable and environmentally-sound manner; to build capacity of households and food systems to adapt to climate change; and to reduce emissions of GHGs and increase carbon sequestration.
Gonsalves adds that CSA also involves protecting ecosystems, such as conserving soils, rainwater and genetic resources, and protecting mangroves, and forest and water resources.
In the CSA project, Gonsalves hopes to demonstrate that ecosystem elements interact with farms and local communities and that natural resource boundaries are important because the ecosystem influences climate adaptation and resilience building.
CSA is usually best undertaken by taking landscapes into consideration because ecosystems are interconnected. Forest and water resources can be conserved. Improvements can help regenerate farms.
However, a degraded natural resource base increases the vulnerability of local communities to the impacts of drought, extreme rain, floods and other natural disasters.
Regenerative agriculture provides many choices for a new focus on climate-smart agriculture. CSA approaches address food and income security while helping reduce the carbon footprint of small farms.
CSA practices include soil, water and nutrient management along with agro-forestry, livestock and forest management techniques.
CSA technologies are already available, just waiting for widespread adoption by smallholder farmers. The adoption needs only to be coordinated and implemented at the local level, where decisions concerning public and private investments are made.

Lessons from CSA project
This is the strategic approach of the three-year CSA project in 2015-2018, funded by the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) programme on climate change, agriculture and food security and managed by the IIRR and World Agroforestry Centre in Vietnam.
So far the project implementers have learned a number of lessons.
First, farmers have basic understanding of climate change and its impacts due to abundance of information (TV, radio and other multimedia sources) but are capable only of translating impacts to their lives based on actual experiences with typhoons and prolonged dry seasons.
Second, the local government partner as well as national government agencies have the same agenda for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The challenge for the project team is how to incorporate the action research agenda into these initiatives.
Third, experiential learning — field-based observation and discussions — has been observed to be the most effective strategy for facilitating learning.
If only South-East Asian governments and international agriculture organisations can speed up the adoption of climate-smart agriculture and stamp out the climate-stupid oil palm plantation agriculture in Indonesia that fuels those everlasting Indonesian fires, we might have a cleaner environment in the Asia-Pacific region.

Links

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• COP21 declaration calls for agriculture diversification
• Carbon mapping tool monitors deforestation
• Asia-Pacific growth needs disaster resilience
• El Nino favourable to dengue outbreaks
• Climate change is hazardous to health in the Pacific

Europe Watch Out The Climate Change Refugee Crisis Is Only Just Beginning

Quartz - Peter Schwartzstein

Drought is ravaging Ethiopia's Somali region. (Reuters/Tiksa Negeri)

The Amhara Plateau is no one's idea of a gloomy landscape. Rich fields blossom as far as the eye can see; bountiful rivers zigzag through the region's rolling hills. It isn't hard to see why local Orthodox Christians believe the Ark of the Covenant was floated down the Nile from Egypt and ended up here. Nor why desert raiders continually stormed in off the nearby Sahara for hundreds of years.
But to those who farm the fertile reaches of Western Ethiopia, their home environment is growing a good deal less enticing by the day.
Erratic temperatures and rains, which culminated last year in the total failure of the belg, the short rainy season, have struck locals hard. In a country still scarred by the deadly famines of the 1980s and 90s, reduced crop yields are panicking villagers, almost all of whom rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

There's plenty of evidence that migration in sub-Saharan Africa is partly due to extreme weather. 

"The rains are very weak and in winter the cold is like nothing I've seen before," said Barakat Daniel, gesturing at a mostly empty trench he uses to irrigate his teff crop on a muddy hillock just outside Bahir Dar. "It's a hard life."

For some ambitious young men, conditions have long since crumbled to intolerable levels. They've tired of tilling land that's become harder to farm as older farmers sub-divide their already small holdings into miniature plots for their many children. With population growth overwhelming meager services at the same time as intense weather plagues farmland, more and more people from the region appear to be following the example of refugees from violence-afflicted parts of Africa, and making a break for Europe.

Droughts have caused conflict between communities fighting over food and resources around Ethiopia's Lake Turkana. (Reuters/Siegfried Modola)

Last July in Metema, an Ethiopian border town, where Sudanese flout their country's prohibition on alcohol by darting across the frontier to patronize streetside bars, I met a 22-year-old man who gave his name only as Gebremichael. He was waiting to cross into Sudan. "Why am I going?" he said. "Because I'm trying to improve myself and that's just not possible when your land gets worse and worse." He had toted a moth-eaten German language dictionary around for over a year, working to absorb new words at every available opportunity.
These days, climate change is in vogue. Everything from the war in Syria to unrest in West Africa has been laid at the feet of the weather gods. Some of the claims have been dismissed as spurious. But there's plenty of evidence that migration in sub-Saharan Africa is indeed partly due to extreme weather.
70% of the continent's migrants have left their homes because of poverty or a lack of work, according to research provided by the UN Environment Program (UNEP).  An estimated 64% of Africans—and close to 90% of Ethiopians—earn their living from agriculture.

The authorities estimate the number of migrants by counting the bodies of those who've succumbed to the heat. 

"Considering the very low baseline, where 25% of the continent go to bed hungry, where over 50% live on less than $1.25 per day, and where youth unemployment is at 60%, climate induced declines in productivity in the agricultural sector indirectly drive migration," said Richard Munang, who heads UNEP's African Regional Climate Change Program from Nairobi.
Skeptics may wonder why it's only now that East Africans are making their way north; after all, Ethiopia and its neighbors have seen plenty of deadly natural disasters in the past.
But the routes forged by largely Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees of war have opened up new possibilities. The demand has led smugglers to lower their prices and expand their knowhow. And for some East Africans, the sense that the sparse rains and unpredictable temperature shifts are both worse than before and here to stay has tipped the scales.
In Metema, where I met Gebremichael, immigration officials say they're seeing more travelers, most of whom hail from the desperately poor, drought-ridden Somali region of Ethiopia.
At Delgo, about 1,000 km (620 miles) north and in the heart of ancient Nubia, a Sudanese policeman said more and more migrants were following the abandoned British-era rail track north—even at the height of summer. The authorities estimate the total by counting the bodies of those who've succumbed to the heat.

Ethiopian dam projects have taken water from the Nile in Egypt, forcing farmers who relied on it for irrigation to turn to wells. (Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany)

And in Cairo, where many Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Sudanese congregate before attempting the dangerous maritime hop, refugee activists say new arrivals from Sub-Saharan Africa may have as much as doubled over the past year, as higher food prices and tougher climes bite further south.

A 2015 World Bank study suggested climate change will pitch at least 100 million people back into poverty, mostly in Africa, by 2030.

Many African migrants are particularly likely to chance the illegal sea passage, campaigners say. "Most of them can't speak Arabic so can't work, and they experience bad racism because they're black," said one social worker, who asked not to be named. Hard though it is for climate migrants to get refugee status and resettlement in the West, many are resolved to risk the journey.
In 1990, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruption would displace up to 200 million migrants by 2050. And last year a World Bank study suggested that climate change will pitch at least 100 million people back into poverty, mostly in Africa, by 2030.
A few Western governments have mooted plans to help struggling African countries counter the consequences of a changing climate. The UK's Department for International Development, for one, gave £10 million (then about $15 million) in December to help Sudanese farmers boost their "resilience" and combat desertification. But with Europe already struggling to cope with the relatively small numbers of war refugees, it seems unlikely that current immigration policies will do much to dissuade climate migrants, many of whom feel they have nothing to lose. On my journey I often heard variations on a common refrain: "I'm dead if I stay, so it doesn't matter if I die on the way."

Australian Emissions Rising Towards Historical Highs And Will Not Peak Before 2030, Analysis Finds

Fairfax - Tom Arup

Australia will likely meet its decade-end target even as national emissions rise and may continue to do so for years. Photo: Glen McCurtayne

Australia's national greenhouse gas emissions are set to keep rising well beyond 2020 on current trends, with the projected growth rate one of the worst in the developed world, a new analysis has found.
An assessment of recent government emissions data, carried out by the carbon consultancy firm RepuTex, says that in the 2014-15 financial year Australia's carbon pollution rose for the first time in almost a decade when compared to the previous year.
From there they say separate government forecasts, also released late last year, show Australia's emissions are on track for a further 6 per cent increase to 2020.
RepuTex's own projections find that on these trends Australian emissions would still not reach a peak before 2030, taking pollution beyond the historical high set almost a decade ago.

Australia's emissions bound Photo: RepuTex, Department of Environment

RepuTex said this trajectory would put Australia's absolute emissions growth among the highest for developed nations. Only Finland, Sweden and Estonia are forecast to do worse between 2000 and 2020, with emissions falling in countries such as the United States, Germany and Britain.

Source: UNFCCC, RepuTex Photo: RepuTex

The latest government emissions data – released in late December – recorded a 1.3 per cent increase in emissions across 2014-15, largely due to increased land clearing and a surge of brown coal power generation. The national carbon price was repealed in July 2014, and replaced by the direct action plan, which aims to buy emissions cuts from businesses and farmers and set limits on industrial emissions.
While emissions were forecast to rise by the government out to 2020, it is a significantly lower increase than had been previously projected.
RepuTex argues these lower projections for 2020 are predominantly due to a reassessment of future economic growth rates. A spokesman for Environment Minister Greg Hunt said it was due to a more efficient economy, greater take up of renewable energy and lower land sector emissions.
More broadly Mr Hunt's spokesman hit out at RepuTex's track record, saying it had previously mis-forecast the results of auctions under direct action and whether Australia would meet its 2020 goal.
Although national emissions are rising, Australia will still almost certainly achieve its 2020 emissions reduction target of 5 per cent from 2000 levels. At the Paris climate summit last year Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia would, "meet and beat our 2020 emissions reduction target".
RepuTex executive director Hugh Grossman said the government would largely meet its 2020 goal by relying on "carry over" carbon credits it had received for bettering an earlier target under the Kyoto Protocol.
At the Paris climate conference five countries – including Germany, Britain and Denmark – announced they would cancel out their carryover credits rather than use them to meet future targets.
"Meeting Australia's abatement task is largely just a victory in accounting terms," Mr Grossman said.
"We have met our target, but we used a credit to get there, so it's not a sign of any progress to reduce emissions."
Under the new climate agreement struck at the Paris conference, Australia has also pledged a goal to cut emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels. Mr Hunt's spokesman said the government had laid out policies that would meet that goal.
The government has said it will review climate policy in 2017, including the potential use of international carbon permits to meet climate goals.
Mr Hunt's spokesman added the government expected the future emissions projections would again be revised down following the success at the Paris climate conference, changes in commodity demand and the outcomes of consultation on new government programs under development, including car emissions standards and a national energy productivity plan.
He said Australia's 2014-15 absolute emissions were the second lowest in the past 15 years. He also pointed to falling emissions when accounted for per person and by economic production.

Links

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• Changes to Victoria's bush will have to be accepted under global warming: scientists