Cold comfort on climate change

Andy Jarvis: hot stuff
Andy Jarvis: hot stuff
That paper on preparing for climate change in Africa is getting a fair bit of traction, not all of it quite as nuanced as Luigi might have liked. And as luck would have it, one of the things ignored in the paper blipped onto my radar via the CIAT blog. Our mate Andy Jarvis ((Gorging himself at Charles de Gaulle airport even as I write this.)) briefed his colleagues on climate change and research at CIAT. One of his conclusions:

We face a serious scientific gap in understanding crop substitution, current models assume that a maize farmer today will be a maize farmer tomorrow. In reality, many will need to select a different crop to what they have now.

Perhaps Marshall Burke and his team will now crank the machine and make some genetically nuanced predictions about how much change of crops — rather than varieties within a crop — might be needed. But that will require some pretty fundamental understanding of how and under what circumstances farmers adopt new (or old) crops and how best to facilitate that process. How much do the social anthropologists know about this?

Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, which I’ve mentioned before, has many insights into the factors that resulted in the rapid uptake of maize in Africa. But can the factors that promoted maize be easily reversed to favour sorghum or pearl millet? I have no idea, but I doubt it. How many crop failures will it take before either farmers or their advisors are willing to try something new?

And in other climate change news, a series of policy briefs from the International Food Policy Research Institute sets out An Agenda for Negotiation in Copenhagen. Detailed proposals are in the briefs. Executive summary:

  1. Investments. There must be explicit inclusion of agriculture-related investments, especially as part of a Global Climate Change Fund.
  2. Incentives. There must be a deliberate focus on introducing incentives to reduce emissions and support technological change.
  3. Information. There must be a solid commitment to establishing comprehensive information and monitoring services in soil and land use management for verification purposes.

Stay tuned.

Climate change: predictions hotting up

ResearchBlogging.org Faced with pessimistic predictions of the impact of climate change, it’s too easy to throw your hands up in the air and cry “there’s nothing to be done”. Or, as a few people still do, to throw your hands up in the air and cry “there’s no need to do anything”. But if they turn to the latest issue of Global Environmental Change, policy-makers, plant breeders and genebank managers should be able to throw their hands in the air with a cry of joy: “This is what we need to do.”

Percentage overlap between historical and 2025 (left), 2050 (middle), and 2075 (right) simulated growing season average temperature over African maize area. Dark blue colors represent 100% overlap between past and future climates, dark red colors represent 0% overlap.
Percentage overlap between historical and 2025 (left), 2050 (middle), and 2075 (right) simulated growing season average temperature over African maize area. Dark blue colors represent 100% overlap between past and future climates, dark red colors represent 0% overlap.

The authors of Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation are Marshall Burke and David Lobell of the Program on Food Security and the Environment, at Stanford University, and our own Luigi Guarino, wearing his Global Crop Diversity Trust hat. ((Burke, M., Lobell, D., & Guarino, L. (2009). Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation Global Environmental Change DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.04.003. And though the article is beyond a paywall, which is why I am quoting extensively, I’m sure one of the authors would be able to send you a reprint.))

The approach is quite straightforward. First, they ask how crop climates will change across Africa. This involves taking historical data for a particular place and comparing the climate there to the predictions of a whole bunch of climate change models. They then ask how quickly the predicted changes will push local climate outside the limits of recent local experience. In addition, they looked at different climates across the continent, asking whether future climates are currently present somewhere in the country, or elsewhere on the continent. The goal is

[T]o identify both future problem regions with no analogs on the continent in today’s climate, and countries whose current crop areas appear likely analogs to many future climates, with the latter case representing promising areas for genetic resource collection and preservation.

They do so for the three primary rain-fed crops of sub-Saharan Africa: maize, sorghum and pearl millet, which provide roughly a third of the calories consumed, and almost two-thirds in some countries.

The big predicted change of all the models is in temperature, which gets hotter almost everywhere, with much less agreement among the models of how much rainfall will change. Skipping over just how fast climates are changing (“rapidly”) and keeping in mind the large time lags involved in breeding crops suited to changed climates, Burke et al. warn that their results “suggest a pressing need to develop breeding programs that anticipate these rapidly warming growing environments.”

So there’s one thing people can do, now.

Where will the raw material for those breeding programmes come from? Genebanks, natch. Alas,

African cereals are often poorly represented in international genebanks, and national genebanks on the continent are frequently resource-constrained and not always representative of the crop genetic diversity in the country.

Burke, Lobell and Guarino look at the spatial distribution of climate analogues and calculate “self-overlap,” overlap of the extremes of projected climate with today’s climate within the country. ((Actually, with the average of the past 10 years of observed climate, long enough to average out extremes but short enough to capture the current climate.)) There’s a nifty graph of the overlap for each of the three crops in all the countries, but the take home message is that despite the lack of overlap in some places, there’s still enough variation that a country might be a good source of variability for its own needs. On the other hand, future temperature regimes are likely to be so hot that even those countries that have large self-overlaps will likely have to look outside their own borders for varieties that will thrive in their expected climates.

Many countries with low self-overlap nevertheless have five or more countries that overlap 75% with their new climates.

For these countries, breeding efforts to cope with warming could greatly benefit from accessing genetic resources beyond their own borders.

Something else to do, now.

There are, however, also countries, most of them in the Sahel, that have low self-overlap and fewer than 5 analogs in other countries. They’re already the hottest climates in Africa, and likely to become hotter, so it ought not to be a surprise that their options are going to be limited.

Unfortunately, primary centers of maize diversity outside Africa, such as in Mexico, enjoy much cooler climates than much of Africa. If breeding efforts cannot sustain yield for maize for these hottest climates in the face of warming temperatures, switches to potentially more heat- and drought-tolerant crops, such as sorghum and millet could be necessary.

Then there are the happy countries whose current climates contain analogues to many future novel climates. Their genetic diversity will be valuable for future breeding efforts. Are they safe?

Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Mozambique … are particularly poorly represented in national and international genebanks. The top ten analog countries for maize — those which overlap most with anticipated novel climates on the continent — each have fewer than 150 landrace accessions in major genebanks. These countries appear as particularly high priorities for urgent collection and conservation of maize genetic resources. … The results for sorghum and millet show qualitatively similar patterns as the results for maize.

There’s a lot more meat in the paper, which repays close reading. It really does contain evidence-based policy advice, on how best to make use of a limited pot of cash by setting the right priorities and establishing the right kinds of cooperative efforts.

Is anyone (who matters) listening?

The politics of toddy

Coconut farmers receive Toddy Movement members released on bail.

That’s the intriguing title of a short piece from Tamil Nadu on the NewKerala.com website. It turns out that dozens of farmers had been thrown in jail a few days ago for tapping coconut toddy without the permission of the state government. The farmers claim that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi has reneged on an election promise to rethink the ban on toddy in force in the state. So they started tapping and selling the beverage in their fields in protest. The reaction seemed a bit heavy-handed to me, but apparently toddy is a bit of a political hot potato (as it were) in Tamil Nadu:

In Tamil Nadu, this beverage is currently banned, though the legality fluctuates with politics. In the absence of legal toddy, moonshine distillers of arrack often sell methanol-contaminated alcohol, which can have lethal consequences. To discourage this practice, authorities have pushed for inexpensive “Indian Made Foreign Liquor” (IMFL), much to the dismay of toddy tappers.

Last year the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Tamil Nadu government to prohibit the manufacture, sale and consumption of toddy in the state (there is no ban in other states). The Chief Justice explained the decision in part thus:

“it is a policy decision of the State government. There is no fundamental right to manufacture or trade in liquor. The problem with toddy is it affects ordinary people in villages. Whisky or other liquor is not easily accessible to the common man.”

So that’s allright then. Now, the statement made in an article in The Hindu a few years back about the consequences of the ban for rural livelihoods may be a bit exaggerated:

The Salem district unit of National Agriculturalists Awareness Movement (NAAM) staged a demonstration here on Friday asking the State Government to allow toddy tapping… They said the denial of toddy tapping had ushered in poverty in rural areas.

But toddy must represent a significant contribution to the income of thousands of farming families — and no doubt has done for generations. And the ban may well be contributing to the disappearance of specialized coconut types. Why replant and tend varieties favoured for toddy if you can’t make the stuff?

Go on, Chief Minister Karunanidhi: legalize it!

Turning point, or dew on a leaf?

Elizabeth Finkel reports for Science from the 3rd meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Tunis last week. Here’s the bottom line:

In a remarkable and unexpected climax as the meeting drew to a close, the treaty governing body agreed to raise $116 million for a biodiversity fund that would support traditional farmers. That helped avert a crisis of confidence in the treaty, says Bhatti, who calls the meeting “a real turning point.” Worede, more circumspect, describes the biodiversity fund as a “little progress.” However, he says, “Anything voluntary is like the dew on a leaf: It can fall down at any time. The contributions should be binding.” ((Scientists Seek Easier Access to Seed Banks.))