Category: Climate change

Posted on

New Scientist on how to get through the next 100 years

An article in New Scientist tells us how to survive the 21st century, what with climate change and all.

There’s a paragraph on agriculture ((The links are provided as in the original article. I didn’t add them myself.)):

Since water will be scarce, food production will need to be far more efficient. Hot growing seasons will be more common, meaning that livestock will become increasingly stressed, and crop growing seasons will shorten, according to David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues (Science, vol 323, p 240). We will need heat and drought-tolerant crop varieties, they suggest. Rice may have to give way to less thirsty staples such as potatoes.

The interactive map also has stuff on agriculture. Check out in particular Southern Europe, where, apparently, “[a]lthough agriculture will be largely impossible, hardy animals such as goats will be kept on the fringes of the desert.”

Posted on

Blooming desert

Sudan.jpg

The picture, from Google Earth, shows a bit of Sudan in December 2003. The white line is 1 km long. I think that’s standing water just above the line, with quite large trees north of the water. How they got there made my jaw drop.

John Greenfield ((Please, please let that be his real last name, for the sake of nominative determinism.)) was working on a “Savannah Development Project” almost 40 years ago. The project required a D6 Caterpillar bulldozer to make airstrips for the project’s plane. In between times, John put the bulldozer to other uses:

I constructed a massive absorption bank across a dry Wadi in order to show the Sudanese, the importance of moisture conservation. I remember when I was building this bank thinking, you will be able to see this from the air.

And you surely can! As John points out, one of the big problems with desert soils is that they crust over, so that any rain that does fall runs off and does not penetrate. Slow the flow down, with any kind of barrier on a contour, and the water goes into the soil. John’s idea was for “linear farms” established behind vetiver hedges.

Once you have collected runoff from a wadi, and let it soak in to the soil you can grow some very useful crops that would have been impossible without the moisture conservation. The biggest problem with deserts is uncontrolled runoff – hence my idea of ‘Linear farms’ behind vetiver hedges – a farm 10m wide X 1000m along the hedge equals 1 ha. That is a hectare of land that would produce well, as opposed to the thousands of hectares of little farms producing a few survivors of what was planted.

When I worked in this desert, I use to visit these little farms and talk with the farmers ( who made their money out of collecting Gum Arabic, and were bloody well robbed) We would look at their ‘farm’ and there would be a dozen or so stalks of sorghum waving in the breeze and I would ask why they thought those plants grew well when the rest failed – no idea – on closer inspection of the surviving individuals, they were all, without exception, growing in hollows in the field that the runoff had collected in. Now, I said, if we extended these ‘hollows’ around the contour or across the slope (made contour furrows) then all the seed would flourish. And doing just that enabled me to produce the heaviest crops of Sorghum this area had ever seen.

Did anything ever become of the idea? I doubt it, or we would surely have heard about it. But it seems on the face of it a brilliant technique for using agrobiodiversity to enable farmers to grow more agricultural biodiversity.

And if you want to see for yourself, point GE at 13 05’22.52”N 30 14’09.07”E

Posted on

Assisting crop wild relatives

You may remember my recent nibble on assisted migration. I also sent the link to the CropWildRelatives discussion group, which elicited this response from Nigel Maxted at the University of Birmingham:

This is indeed an interesting question. My first reaction was that it was a purely academic exercise that will do little to benefit overall biodiversity and probably could not be applied for a wide range of species even if this were economically and practically feasible. It might even do harm because government might use research like this to play down the impact of climate change and avoid the necessity of taking harsh economic decisions. This may well be the case, but for the key 500-700 globally important CWR I do think this is the sort of research we should enacting now. These critical 500-700 species will be so vital to future food security, not least to combating climate change itself, that we need to ensure that they are allowed to continue evolving in situ in the changing environment and make doubly sure we have these species’ genetic diversity adequately conserved ex situ. The research need not focus on the entire 500-700 CWR but could be passed through a modeled climate change impact filter first to identify those species most likely to be impacted in the short term and most likely to be successful in transposition. Perhaps as a community the time is right to systematically address this issue.

Posted on

Agrobiodiversity and the food crisis

UNEP has just published The environmental food crisis – The environment’s role in averting future food crises. ((Nellemann, C., MacDevette, M., Manders, T., Eickhout, B., Svihus, B., Prins, A. G., Kaltenborn, B. P. (Eds). February 2009. The environmental food crisis – The environment’s role in averting future food crises. A UNEP rapid response assessment. United Nations Environment Programme, GRID-Arendal. ISBN: 978-82-7701-054-0)) I found out about it because its illustrations are separately available on the GRID-Arendal website and I subscribe to its feed. Which is weird, because I’d have thought UNEP would make more of this. Maybe I just missed the announcement of the launch.

Any agricultural biodiversity in it, I hear you ask. Actually, perhaps surprisingly, yes. There’s a box on “Using crop genetic diversity to combat pests and diseases in agriculture” on page 57. There’s a box on “Enhancing sustainability through the use of crop wild relatives” on page 74. And, though admittedly it doesn’t address agrobiodiversity specifically, there’s a section on increasing research investment in agriculture on page 81. I’ll take that.

Posted on

Blogging the big birthday: What would Darwin make of Climate Change

No-one escapes our appeal to celebrate Darwin’s birthday. This just in from Andy Jarvis:

Julián lost his blogging virginity just a few days ago with his post on “Is all climate change bad?.” His points are very valid. The wording in IPCC reports is that many crops become more productive with a 2 degree C temperature hike. It is only beyond that, which is expected 2050 onwards, that productivity significantly goes down on a global scale. And a lot can happen between now and then.

Given the historic day, I wondered what Darwin would make of all this? Surely he’d say that there’s nothing like a bit of selection pressure to bring about evolution. And ho boy do we need some evolution — let’s face it, the system is not working particularly well right now, and that is not limited to biology. Nothing like a crisis to bring about social change and promote innovation. So, on this day, I’d like to make a toast to selection pressure, and I hope that it stimulates changes in the fundamental system of agriculture to select against some of the bizarre, environmentally unsustainable practices and socially inequitable policies that are out there.