The Doha meet on climate change in December failed to evolve a consensus on addressing agricultural adaptation to a shifting climate scenario. But outside of diplomatic circles, people are noticing that climate change has already taken hold and governments are taking action, though the scale is not big.
New methods are needed so that all the world's farmers can keep pace with the changing weather, explains Bruce Campbell.
Weather and agriculture have always been intertwined in almost every part of the world. No matter which continent, farmers have always been at the mercy of rainfall and temperature.
Thus it is curious that most of the conversation surrounding climate change—how the weather has been modified by industrial activity—revolves around reducing emissions (climate 'mitigation') and not on how to modify agriculture to new weather conditions.
But with the world population expected to rise by another one billion people in 15 years, we need to produce more food with less emissions while adapting to changing climates.
Another round of international negotiations on climate change wrapped up in Doha, Qatar, last month without a major consensus on emissions. This was mostly expected—at the talks in the previous edition, the most important decision was to draft a legally binding international treaty in 2015 that would take effect in 2020. The recent talks marked the beginning of that effort.
Strikingly, though, there was a lack of consensus on addressing agricultural adaptation. Efforts to implement a formal programme that addresses the dire problem of food security ended without agreement and the issue was punted to June this year for additional discussion.
But outside of diplomatic circles, a different consensus is forming—one that does not rely on negotiations. People are noticing that climate change has already taken hold. Maybe this is due to the superstorm of news coverage that followed Hurricane Sandy, which caused more than $50 billion in damage in the New York City region.
More likely, though, it was the failed monsoon that withered crop yields in India, or the fierce drought that hit most of the United States this year and that many other places still confront. In Doha, like much of the Middle East and North Africa, deserts and other drylands are becoming even drier, driving down local crop yields. Food prices have become increasingly volatile.
Government efforts
Many governments are not waiting for an international consensus before taking action. In Brazil, for example, a two-year-old, $250-million programme has financed more than 2,000 farming projects to help recover degraded pastures, improve the processing of livestock waste, implement no-till agriculture to increase the life of the soil, plant commercial forests and employ other practices that have low emissions and respond to the changing climate.
In Niger, more than 1,000 separate projects were implemented in agriculture, fisheries and livestock management, benefiting more than 1,00,000 people.
These projects developed almost 9,000 hectares of land with more sustainable management practices. Almost 90 per cent of them reduced water and soil erosion. They also increased plant cover and the amount of carbon stored in the landscape.
In Vietnam, rice productivity was increased and methane emissions reduced through intermittent draining of the paddies. The project was launched in 2007, and by 2011, more than one million farmers were using the approach on 1,85,000 hectares, increasing yields by 9 to 15 per cent and farmer income by $95 to $260 per hectare per crop season.
Trouble with scale
These initiatives are all successful, but the problem lies in their scale. Only 10 per cent of Vietnamese rice farmers are served by that country's programme; a sizeable increase in capital is needed to expand the programme's reach.
It is unclear whether Vietnam, Niger and other developing countries will ever have sufficient funds accessible to farmers that can be used to tackle adaptation. This is where the shortcomings of the international efforts hurt most.
In the absence of a global treaty that provides incentives for farm adaptation, there is often no choice but to continue with traditional methods. New approaches are desperately needed so that all the world's farmers can keep pace with the changing weather.
(Bruce Campbell is the director of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, based in Copenhagen.)