Indigenous knowledge systems

December 1, 2008December 1, 2008

Adaptation for tropical forests, tropical forests for adaptation

“Climate change could have a devastating effect on the worldâ€™s forests and the nearly 1 billion people who depend on them for their livelihoods” ((That many? I think that they count anyone who uses a tree as part of their livelihood as someone dependent on forests. They might as well say that we all depend on forests, which we do.)) says the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in a press release about a new report.

Unless immediate action is taken.

CIFOR proposes helping forests adapt by taking measures such as improving fire management; using plantation species that can cope with future climate; and helping forests evolve with changing climate rather than resist it. Forests can help us adapt — reduce the vulnerability of society to climate change — by assuring the flow of ecosystem services.

There should be help for the people who are managing, living in or conserving forests to adapt to future changes:

â€œThe people living in forests are highly dependent on forest goods and services and are often very vulnerable socioeconomically,â€ says Bruno Locatelli, a CIFOR scientist and lead author of the report. â€œThey usually have a much more intimate understanding of their forests than anyone else, but the unprecedented rates of climate change will almost certainly jeopardise their ability to adapt to new conditions. They will need help.â€

Helping the people who know best seems an interesting contradiction and I wondered how they were proposing to go about that. Participatory approaches, it seems. I could not find that much about it in the report, which focuses on process and policy. Take this excerpt from Box 11 on “The role of science in coordinating and supporting adaptive processes in West Africa” (by Houria Djoudi, Hermann Kambire and Maria Brockhaus).

A workshop on local governance, forests and adaptive capacities in a municipality in southwest Burkina Faso, with actors from different scales, established a platform for shared knowledge and learning on forests and adaptation to climate change. Efforts to contribute to vertical coordination of adaptation, as well as support for local governance and horizontal coordination in decision making processes related to climate change adaptation and forests, are ongoing.

CIFOR also has an interesting little report on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

November 28, 2008October 13, 2010

SRI: does it work or what?

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) strikes again, now on Java and Bali:

Farmers across Indonesia have bumper rice harvests thanks to a revolutionary method: 50 percent increase in yield with just one 10th of the seed, virtually no chemical fertilizers and little water.

SRI is a system which consists of transplanting widely spaced very young individual rice plants, using organic fertilizers, and not permanently saturating the fields with water. The method was developed — on the basis of existing farmer practices — by a priest in Madagascar in the 1980s, and it has since found a prophet in Norman Uphoff. It is still used in Madagascar, but mainly by larger farmers, as it is too labor intensive for the smaller farmers (who do the work for the large farmers). Or so I was told when I visited there earlier this year.

The BBC reported a doubling of yields in Nepal. George Bush was briefed about it during his visit to India. Luigi wrote about it a year ago. And now the reports of bumper crops in Indonesia.

All is for the best then? Not really: the whole thing is rather controversial. Tom Sinclair said this about it in 2004:

SRI appears to be only the latest in a family of unconfirmed field observations (UFOs) (…). While there is an abundance of “sightings,” they are anecdotal and reported by people who have minimum understanding of the basic scientific principles being challenged by such reports. In many cases, mysterious circumstances are invoked to explain the miraculous.

In a rather thorough review, in 2006, McDonald, Hobbs and Riha found that it sometimes works (in Madagascar), but that generally yields are 11% lower with SRI, not higher.

What is one to think then? Do newspapers blindly follow NGOs, and do farmers say what is scripted? Another case of overselling? Or is this a true farmer/priest led breakthrough, which scientist at fancy universities and research institutes just do not get?

There certainly has been overselling, with claims of unrealistically high rice yields (e.g., 15 tons per hectare). However, there could be circumstances where SRI does have benefits, for example on some problem soils (with iron toxicity), and perhaps in other low potential situations as well.

When SRI ‘works’, it is hard to know what farmers really did. Perhaps planting density was not quite that low, and organic fertilizer were applied at very high. What is SRI being compared with anyway? A degenerate farm, or a fully optimized ‘modern’ farm?

More field trials are planned. I am not optimisitic, but let’s hope that they will provide some clarity about the conditions under which SRI increases yields (or not). The dispute would be settled, and we’d have more rice for less resources.

November 25, 2008

Slow Food on the move

The Slow Food movement is evolving, its founder says: “People who sniff a cheese and talk about how it has the most wonderful aroma of horse sweat. Think how incredibly boring we would be if we were still just a gastronomic society.”

November 21, 2008November 21, 2008

Nibbles: Radishes, Fungi, Genomics, Bagel, Eels, Barack Hussein, Pomegranate

Vavilov does radishes.
“How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
“The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
“The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
“He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
“Activists” buttonhole Obama.
The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.

November 20, 2008November 21, 2008

The Lost Cities of the Amazon

That’s the cheesy title of what should be a fascinating National Geographic documentary on a subject that we’ve covered here a number of times: the idea that the Amazon was once thickly settled. If anyone sees it, do let us know what it’s like.