Category: 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.

As the entire thinking world prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, tomorrow, lots of people (ourselves including) are unable to contain themselves. One of those is R. Ford Denison, who shares a selection of Darwin quotes that he was preparing to take to a celebratory dinner. A great selection it is too, revealing Denison’s own status as a man who takes evolution in agriculture very seriously. I wouldn’t say that this was my own favourite, but it is one that I had not noted before:

Look at a plant in the midst of its range, why does it not double or quadruple its numbers? We know it can perfectly well withstand a little more heat or cold, dampness or dryness, for elsewhere it ranges into slightly hotter or colder, damper or drier districts. In this case we can clearly see that if we wish in imagination to give the plant the power of increasing in number, we should have to give it some advantage over its competitors, or over the animals which prey on it.

There’s more where that came from.

Julián Ramírez-Villegas commented on the 4th World Congress on Conservation Agriculture, which we nibbled last week. We’re elevating his comment to a guest post.

I was on that conference last week (the conservation agriculture one). Surprisingly, all people there are completely [certain] that climate change is completely bad (and that there are no chances of survival for our agricultural systems while we don’t switch to conservation agriculture). They always point [out] the bad side of each issue (i.e. they say: more rainfall means flooding and less rainfall means more water consumption) and put that as an universal truth, which is not very scientific I guess, but you judge.

They also have these global-averages indicating that population is growing up to a number we won’t be able to feed in 2050, that water resources are to decline worldwide, that yields are completely falling down, and that soil is about to lose its most important fertility properties. But I wasn’t able to find any specific case where all those things could happen at the same time. However, at the end of each presentation you find the phrase “more resources for R & D”, which from my side looks a bit suspicious.

Say, I’m not sure about what could happen up to 2050, but we have these GC models saying that impacts vary according to different areas. And I wonder if one could try to change all agricultural systems in the world (one by one) using such global averages and coarse statistics.

And a very quick question: “how would one expand/intensify a conservation agriculture system, if it is supposed to be used in smallholdings, which owners don’t have either the land or the financial support to expand/intensify their systems?”