Category: Climate change

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Help for coffee farmers in Central America

From Andy Jarvis:

What if major coffee regions in Latin America were to disappear altogether in the next generation? What would that mean for you as a consumer? Or your children? And what about coffee farmers in Latin America? And their children? What will they do if their livelihoods disappear? At CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture), we have been working for years to develop crop targeting tools based on climate scenarios that show how climate change could alter production systems throughout the region in the years to come. We propose to expand our work to generate a range of possible scenarios for changing patterns of land use in Mexico and Central America, and to partner with CRS (Catholic Relief Services) to help coffee farmers develop strategies to more effectively mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change under each one. In collaboration with CRS, we can directly impact 7000 farmers and generate learning that helps hundreds of thousands more.

Like the idea? Then vote for it!

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Partially relevant nominative determinism

Not strictly relevant to our self-imposed beat, of course, but as it already gave my compadre Luigi a quick post I feel I ought to share …

There’s a strange phenomenon (in whose origin, I freely admit, I had some impact) called nominative determinism. Briefly, your name suits your job and, of course, vice versa. Thus Lord Brain was an eminent neurologist before he was ennobled. So at a talk this morning on wise management of water resources, I perked up when I saw that the crucial research on partial rootzone drying was by a man called Peter Dry. Luigi was good enough to check the reference, and indeed, Hormonal changes induced by partial rootzone drying of irrigated grapevine exists and Dry is one of the authors.

All fun aside, it is a valuable technique for reducing water use by up to 50% while still maintaining good grape production and, apparently, a pretty drinkable vintage. No word though of whether the wine was a tad brut too.

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Climate vulnerability in SE Asia mapped

The International Development Research Centre’s Economy and Environment Program for South-East Asia (EEPSEA) has just published a study on the effects of climate change on SE Asia. The authors first mapped climate hazard, including all kinds of different things, from drought to cyclones to sea level rise. They then compared that with maps of population density and adaptive capacity. That allowed them to identify a number of vulnerability hotspots. And here they are, the most vulnerable areas in each country:

seasia-country-hotspots

All good places in which to start looking for agrobiodiversity to collect for ex situ conservation before it disappears, and in which to test agrobiodiversity for its possible contribution to adaptation.