2. The other inconvenient truth; Another Inconvenient Truth Posted by: "Jim Roland" [email protected] jimroland99 Tue Oct 6, 2009 1:57 pm (PDT)
1. http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2196 [This article also published by The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/06/global-land-use] ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jonathan Foley is the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of the Minnesota, where he is also a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. He also leads the institute's Global Landscapes Initiative, which focuses on the nexus of global land use, agriculture and the environment. 05 Oct 2009: Opinion The Other Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis in Global Land Use As the international community focuses on climate change as the great challenge of our era, it is ignoring another looming problem — the global crisis in land use. With agricultural practices already causing massive ecological impact, the world must now find new ways to feed its burgeoning population and launch a "Greener" Revolution. by jonathan foley It’s taken a long time, but the issue of global climate change is finally getting the attention it deserves. While enormous technical, policy, and economic issues remain to be solved, there is now widespread acceptance of the need to confront the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. Collectively, we are beginning to acknowledge that our long addiction to fossil fuels — which has been harming our national security, our economy and our environment for decades — must end. The question today is no longer why, but how. The die is cast, and our relationship to energy will never be the same. Unfortunately, this positive shift in the national zeitgeist has had an unintended downside. In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies? Although I’m a climate scientist by training, I worry about this collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems. Learning from the research my colleagues and I have done over the past decade, I fear we are neglecting another, equally inconvenient truth: that we now face a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization. Our use of land, particularly for agriculture, is absolutely essential to the success of the human race. We depend on agriculture to supply us with food, feed, fiber, and, increasingly, biofuels. Without a highly efficient, productive, and resilient agricultural system, our society would collapse almost overnight. But we are demanding more and more from our global agricultural systems, pushing them to their very limits. Continued population growth (adding more than 70 million people to the world every year), changing dietary preferences (including more meat and dairy consumption), rising energy prices, and increasing needs for bioenergy sources are putting tremendous pressure on the world’s resources. And, if we want any hope of keeping up with these demands, we’ll need to double, perhaps triple, the agricultural production of the planet in the next 30 to 40 years. Meeting these huge new agricultural demands will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. At present, it is completely unclear how (and if) we can do it. If this wasn’t enough, we must also address the massive environmental impacts of our current agricultural practices, which new evidence indicates rival the impacts of climate change. Consider the following: Ecosystem degradation. Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. In fact, the area used for agriculture is nearly 60 times larger than the area of all of the world’s cities and suburbs. Since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet’s ecosystems than agriculture. What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change? Freshwater decline. Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of this, 70 percent is used for irrigation, the single biggest use of water, by far, on the globe. As a result, many large rivers have greatly reduced flows and some routinely dry up. Just look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert, or the mighty Colorado River, which no longer sends any water to the ocean, for living proof. And the extraction of water from deep groundwater reserves is almost universally unsustainable, and has resulted in rapidly declining water tables in many regions of the world. Future water demands from increasing population and agricultural consumption will likely climb between 4,500 and 6,200 cubic kilometers per year, hugely compounding the impacts of climate change, especially in arid regions. Widespread pollution. Agriculture, particularly the use of industrial fertilizers and other chemicals, has fundamentally upset the chemistry of the entire planet. Already, the use of fertilizers has more than doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds in the environment, resulting in widespread water pollution and the massive degradation of lakes and rivers. Excess nutrient pollution is now so widespread, it is even contributing to the disruption of coastal oceans and fishing grounds by creating hypoxic “dead zones,” including one in the Gulf of Mexico. Given our current practices, future increases in food demand will dramatically increase water pollution and ecosystem destruction through agricultural effluent. Ironically, the fertilizer runoff from farmlands compromises another crucial source of food: coastal fishing grounds. Greenhouse gas emissions. Last, but certainly not least, land use is also one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Of the three most important man-made greenhouse gasses — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — land use and agricultural practices, including tropical deforestation, emit 30 percent of the total. That’s more than the emissions from all the world’s passenger cars, trucks, trains and planes, or the emissions from all electricity generation or manufacturing. Compared to any other human activity, land use and agriculture are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses. The vast majority comes from deforestation, methane emissions from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from heavily fertilized fields. Yet, for some reason, agriculture has been largely able to avoid the attention of emissions reductions policies. The list of environmental impacts from agricultural land use goes on and on — and clearly threatens human well-being and the health of the biosphere as much as global warming. In fact, in a recent paper in Nature, a number of us documented “planetary boundaries" where large-scale environmental changes could result in catastrophic tipping points. Of those changes, an equal number were tied to climate change and CO2 emissions as were connected to land-use and agriculture. >From these newly revealed facts, it’s clear that we must consider multiple >inconvenient truths. The future of our civilization and our planet requires >that we simultaneously address the grand challenges of climate change and land >use, ultimately finding new ways to meet the needs of our economy, our >security and the environment. Anything less will be a complete catastrophe. So, what are the solutions to the global land crisis? Here are just a few to start with: First, acknowledge the problem. Even in circles of well-informed scientists and agricultural experts, the notion that our land use and agricultural practices rival climate change as a global environmental threat comes as a big surprise. Clearly we need to have a larger international conversation about this issue, on par with the recent efforts of the climate change community and Al Gore, to give it the attention it deserves. Invest in revolutionary agricultural solutions. The Obama administration has invested billions of dollars into new energy technology, research and infrastructure, and aggressive plans for new climate mitigation policies are being developed. These strategies are important, but I wonder where the stimulus funding for new “out of the box” agricultural research is? Where are we investing public dollars in revolutionary approaches to feeding the world, while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture? These might include the development of new hybrid crops, designed to use water and nitrogen more efficiently, or the invention of perennial crops that don't need to be planted every year. Don’t such ideas count as national priorities, too? Can’t we afford to launch a “Greener” Revolution? Bridge the artificial divide between production agriculture and environmental conservation. We cannot solve these problems by boosting agricultural production at the expense of the environment, nor can we ignore the growing need for food in the name of preserving natural ecosystems. Instead, we must find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts. This is not going to be easy. Yet, drawing on the lessons from recent research, including the successes and failures of local organic practice, combined with the efficiency and scalability of commercial agriculture, will be crucial. In recent years, for example, U.S. farmers — working with agricultural experts — have dramatically improved practices in the corn and soybean belt, cutting down on erosion, nutrient loss, and groundwater pollution, even as yields have continued to increase. As a first step, advocates of environmental conservation, organic farming and commercial agriculture all need to put down their guns and work toward solving the problems of food security and the environment — with everyone at the table. Providing for the basic needs of 9 billion-plus people, without ruining the biosphere in the process, will be one of the greatest challenges our species has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world, embarked on one of the noblest causes in history. But the first step is admitting we have more than one problem. POSTED ON 05 Oct 2009 IN Policy & Politics Sustainability North America 2. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=growing-population-poses-malthusian-dilemma October 2, 2009 | 59 comments Another Inconvenient Truth: The World's Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma Solving climate change, the Sixth Great Extinction and population growth... at the same timeBy David Biello MALTHUSIAN DILEMMA: How to feed a human population expected to reach nine billion by 2050 while also grappling with poverty as well as climate change, dead zones, biodiversity loss and other environmental ills? © iStockphoto.com / Tobias Helbig By 2050, the world will host nine billion people—and that's if population growth slows in much of the developing world. Today, at least one billion people are chronically malnourished or starving. Simply to maintain that sad state of affairs would require the clearing (read: deforestation) of 900 million additional hectares of land, according to Pedro Sanchez, director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program at The Earth Institute at Columbia University. The bad news beyond the impacts on people, plants and animals of that kind of deforestation: There isn't that much land available. At most, we might be able to add 100 million hectares to the 4.3 billion already under cultivation worldwide. "Agriculture is the main driver of most ecological problems on the planet," said economist Jeffrey Sachs, Scientific American columnist and Earth Institute director. "We are literally eating away the other species on the planet." Sachs made his remarks yesterday at a symposium hosted by the institute on how to improve agriculture to address the mounting challenge of feeding the world while combating climate change and stopping the wholesale loss of biodiversity, among other interrelated issues. Agriculture—thanks to deforestation, nitrous oxide from fields, methane from cattle and rice paddies—is responsible for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, making emissions from transporting food, known as "food miles," a "rounding error," said ecologist Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota. Pasture has become the dominant ecosystem on the planet, he added, and humans directly employ some 40 percent of the surface of the planet. "Very little of that is urban." In addition, agriculture accounts for at least 85 percent of human water consumption—a growing concern as aquifers diminish and hydrology changes in the face of climate change. And, by Sanchez's rough calculation, humans now use some 171 million tons of nitrogen as fertilizer every year, much of which ends up polluting lakes, rivers, streams and even the ocean. "Fifty-four percent of that is fertilizer—the Haber-Bosch process; 11 percent is atmospheric deposition—the plus side of pollution; 18 percent is in situ fixation," or nitrogen-fixing cover crops, like legumes, Sanchez said. And it's not like so-called organic agriculture is helping with that: Nitrate leaching into waterways can come from manure, as in the Netherlands or overuse of fertilizer, as in Iowa. The result is the same: dead zones. So how can agriculture be intensified to feed a growing population while addressing environmental concerns? Simply put, yields on existing lands must increase. That's what Norman Borlaug and his colleagues achieved in the 1960s and 1970s with the Green Revolution that staved off famine for millions. Yet, "there can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort," Borlaug said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. "[Man] is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas." That demographic contradiction is nowhere more true than in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where a population of 800 million must subsist on local yields of one ton per hectare—one third of yields in the rest of the developing world and one ninth those of the U.S., Europe, Australia and other parts of the developed world. Yet, "we already grow enough food to feed the world, we've been doing that for decades," noted ecologist Catherine Badgley of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (U.M.), who led a study assessing whether organic agriculture practices alone might adequately meet global nutritional requirements. "We need to address accessibility." Global markets for food, however, spectacularly failed in 2008 as countries shut down exports in the face of rising grain prices. "International food markets are deeply wounded and faith in them has collapsed. Global institutions failed to keep food moving," Sachs said. Add to that the looming specter of growing crops for biofuel, which reduce available land for food, feed and fiber production, he said: "Biofuel is going to be an unmitigated disaster, that's as true in an African village as it is in Iowa." Norman Borlaug agreed in a warning he had issued in the 1980s to agricultural economist Mark E. Downing of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Genetically modified varieties—currently illegal in most of Africa, according to political scientist Robert Paarlberg of Wellesley College—might boost yields. Such biotechnology is "critical for achieving the ecological intensification required to meet human food demand on a global scale," argues agronomist Ken Cassman of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. At the same time, genetic modification is not a panacea, despite claims for drought tolerance and the like from companies such as Monsanto. "Anything you do to reduce the water that plants transpire will reduce yield," he added. Perhaps, fortunately, there is still a lot of room for improvement by more conventional means: the targeted application of fertilizer and the like. The Earth Institute's Millennium Village of Sauri in Kenya has tripled yields even in the face of a crippling drought gripping the region, and Malawi doubled yields through fertilizer subsidies in just four years. "If we want to increase production, it's better to have small to medium-size farms," argued U.M. ecologist Ivette Perfecto. "Precision agriculture is already done by [such] farmers." At the same time, the collapse of agriculture in the "bread basket" of eastern Europe, such as Ukraine, leaves room to "triple food production in that region pretty easily," IonE's Foley said. And, ultimately, a little change in diet might do a world of good. Global demand for beef is an inefficient way to get protein, possibly unhealthy, and a major driver of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. "Beef is costly per kilogram ingested of both mass and protein but also probably unhealthy," Sachs said. "We should not take dietary choices as a given but rather as something that needs to be evaluated," at least if we want a fighting chance to avoid the grim fate Thomas Malthus predicted. "Sustainability is still an unsolved problem, it is the same problem Malthus identified about 200 years ago," Sachs added. "How we feed the planet, slow population growth, and thereby raise living standards is still an open question." Editor's Note: We used Twitter to cover the conference live. Follow me @ dbiello or us @ sciam. And thanks to Jon Foley, whose presentation headline, "Another Inconvenient Truth," I have borrowed. __________________________________________________________ Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts. http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/167688463/direct/01/ Back to top Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post _________________________________________________________________ Save time by using Hotmail to access your other email accounts. http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/167688463/direct/01/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
