- Early Peruvians didn’t brush their teeth. On the plus side, they had a tasty, varied diet.
- Mangrove rice farming in West Africa: The Book.
- “Could it be that vegetables are the new meat?“
- Wild relative rescues barleys threatened by Russian pests.
- Gates supports McKnight supports poor farmers.
- Vavilov does Formosa.
- Ethiopian Commodity Exchange gets to grips with coffee. Starbucks unavailable for comment.
Do the right thing
Dan Barber waxes lyrical about foie gras. Not, you might think, the most agrobiodiversity-laden topic in the world. And entirely inappropriate given that a billion people don’t have enough to eat. Hear him out, though, and then decide whether what he says makes sense.
Nibbles: Wikiforéts, Super-rape, Gut microbiome, Soybeans, Golf courses, Chestnuts, Rice, Yeast
- Wiki for African forest information. Go, make it multilingual, fill in the gaps, use it.
- Canola (rape) desalinates, gives fuel and enriched fodder. Jeremy comments: “I’m a tad skeptical.”
- Diversity of intestinal flora good for your figure. Or the other way around.
- Edamame bean comes to Britain. Why, one wonders.
- Golf courses good for salamanders. I wonder if anyone’s looked at how many CWRs they support.
- Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
- Rice domestication unpacked.
- More extreme beer. Oh, and the phylogeny of yeast.
Nibbles: Carbon, Oaks, SALT, Gardens, Wild horses, Rural depopulation, Finnish cows, Dabai
- You can monitor carbon dioxide from fossil fuels by analyzing wine (and maize leaves for that matter).
- Yes, we have no acorns.
- “Salt is sort of a diversified farming system.”
- “There’s a lot to learn from the past and how Native cultures have gardened“
- The end of the mustang?
- Urbanization and biodiversity conservation.
- Convicts conserve cows.
- Freezing technique opens door to commercialization of Canarium odontophyllum in Sarawak.
- Zero Mile Diet Seed Kit.
Adaptation for tropical forests, tropical forests for adaptation
“Climate change could have a devastating effect on the world’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:
“The people living in forests are highly dependent on forest goods and services and are often very vulnerable socioeconomically,†says Bruno Locatelli, a CIFOR scientist and lead author of the report. “They 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).