“…many of the practices recommended to reduce agriculture’s contribution to climate change also will make farms and ranches more resilient to extreme weather and often increase soil health, productivity, and profitability.”
Viewing entries in
The Environment
Alley cropping is an agroforestry practice that involves alternating field crops with rows of trees or shrubs. Besides soaking up emissions and storing carbon, alley cropping reduces surface water runoff and erosion, improves soil quality, enhances habitat for wildlife and beneficial insects, and decreases offsite movement of nutrients or chemicals. Alley cropping also provides farmers the opportunity to make extra revenue given that tree products like fruit and nuts generally fetch higher prices than many field crops. So why haven’t more US farmers adopted the practice?
Many more species will be getting on the extinction express by the end of the century. That’s because habitat loss and deterioration “suggests that around 9 per cent of the world’s estimated 5.9 million terrestrial species – more than 500,000 species – have insufficient habitat for long-term survival, and are committed to extinction, many within decades, unless their habitats are restored “ (Diaz et al, 2019). As for water-dwellers: nearly one-in-three freshwater species around the world are now threatened with extinction…That’s the picture. What to do? Here are some ideas…
Between 1989 and 2008, 1,125 lawsuits were filed challenging the US Forest Service land management decisions. The Forest Service won around half these cases and either lost or settled the rest. Almost 80% of the lawsuits were initiated by environmental groups seeking to protect National Forests. Litigants generally challenged vegetative management, such as debris removal and thinning forests through logging and controlled burns. The median time to case deposition was a year and a half.
A climate-driven global redistribution of species is already underway. But many of the species at greatest risk of extinction from changing weather patterns have insurmountable dispersal barriers – they can’t move elsewhere without help, because roads, cities, farmland, and warring humans get in the way. We could “let nature take its course”, meaning allow mass extinctions. Or, we could very carefully and only as a last resort, move endangered species to save them. Of course, introduced species would have to be monitored closely to insure they’re not too disruptive a presence in their new biological communities. But those communities are already being disrupted by climate change.
As it turns out, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently forecast that US energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would decline by 11% in 2020. Since CO2 emissions account for around 97% of energy-related emissions, we will likely lower CO2 emissions by 10.7% this year alone. How can we lower emissions even more? …
Hundreds of organizations have endorsed the Great American Outdoors Act, including the Audubon Naturalist Society, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Defenders of Wildlife, League of Conservation Voters, National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, and The Nature Conservancy. According to Mark Kramer, a director of the California chapter the Nature Conservancy, one of the highlights of the Great American Outdoors Act is that secures reliable funding to help protect the nation’s ecological diversity, including its wildlife.
After two years of growth, global emissions were unchanged at 33 gigatonnes in 2019 even as the world economy expanded by 2.9%. This was primarily due to declining emissions from electricity generation in advanced economies, thanks to the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar), fuel switching from coal to natural gas, and higher nuclear power generation.
The environmental impact of cattle farming is particularly devastating for the planet, both directly (grazing) and indirectly (feed crops). According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock farming is responsible for 14.5% of the world's greenhouse emissions, of which 65% comes from beef and dairy cattle. Even sustainable cattle grazing “threatens wildlife and takes an enormous toll on habitats, and won’t fix the climate crisis animal agriculture creates”. Without intensifying production, sustainable cattle farming is little more than virtue display.
All the above adaptations would be good ideas even if the climate were not warming. Meaning that even climate change skeptics could get behind these adaptations because they address current threats to humanity and the environment. As documented in The Environmental Concerns of Climate Change Skeptics, beliefs about climate change and caring about the environment are not strongly correlated.
The insecticides I have in mind are neonicotinoids, which have devastated bee populations throughout the world. Seeds treated with neonicotinoids are also toxic to birds (some birds more than others). A few years ago, the European Union banned various neonicotinoids from all agricultural fields because of the harm they caused bees and birds. Follow-up studies are now trickling in from Europe and the results have been quite illuminating. Here are some findings…
The dinosaurs never went extinct. Let’s keep it that way.
Yards make up roughly 17 percent of the continental United States: almost four times the land area taken up by national, state, and regional parks. And those yards are dominated by turf grass, because Americans love their lawns. Which is a shame since lawns tend to be pollinator wastelands and most terrestrial life on earth depends on the labor of pollinators. I’m talking birds and bees.
We have to go beyond categorical, either/or thinking to solve the problem of agriculture and the environment. It’s not about organic versus conventional. It’s about how to grow more food on less land while reducing environmental harm. So that soils remain healthy, more land reverts to wild habitat, and the rest of the biosphere isn’t poisoned by pesticides and fertilizer run-off (including manure).
Obviously there’s no one-to-one association between GDP and CO2 emissions. Other factors come into play, like the particular fuel mix used to generate electricity in a given locale. Speaking of which, look at France…
“Around the world, forests are shrinking due to deforestation, urban development and climate change, but in Europe that trend has been reversed. …Large areas of the continent have seen a forest boom that means today more than two-fifths of Europe is tree-covered. Between 1990 and 2015, the area covered by forests and woodlands increased by 90,000 square kilometres - an area roughly the size of Portugal.”
— Europe bucks global deforestation trend, Johnny Wood/World Economic Forum July 25, 2019
That’s almost 30% more beef produced per cow since 1961. And yet the amount of land devoted to livestock pasture has been declining for the past twenty years…How did we do it?
Republicans used to be more gung-ho about saving endangered species and other environmental causes, e.g., a Republican president established the Environmental Protection Agency and the late, great John McCain fought many battles to protect natural habitats. But then the ardor cooled. Why was that?
Depending on the scenario, average global temperatures may rise anywhere from less than 2°F to over 9°F by 2100 (.9°C – 5.4°C). The question is how to plan for such a range of possible climate futures? I offer some thoughts from people who make a living pondering this very question:
“Uncertain changes in climate, technological, socio-economic and political situations, and the dynamic interaction among these changes, and between these changes and interventions, pose a challenge to planners and decision-makers. Due to these uncertainties, there is a risk of making an inappropriate decision (too little, too much, too soon, or too late).” Kwakkel, J. H., M. Haasnoot, et al., 2016.
Note that I’m not endorsing some measures over others. None of the above measures are mature technologies and none should be excluded from consideration. As energy systems engineer and Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins put it:
“If we’re really in a ‘climate crisis,’ then you go to war with your full arsenal, you don’t hold anything back. And you don’t purposefully make this crisis harder by limiting our already limited options.”