CA-CoP CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

for sustainable production intensification


Dear Subscribers,


Please find herebelow the Green Carbon Conference Newsletter 1.


The Conference is jointly organized by the European Conservation Agriculture Federation (ECAF) and the French Institute for Sustainable Development (IAD), and promoted by the Life+ AGRICARBON Project.


The Conference will be held from 1-3 April 2014 in Brussels.


Amir Kassam

Moderator

 

Plant Production and Protection Division

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
00153 Rome
Italy

e-mail: [log in to unmask]

URL: www.fao.org/ag/ca



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Green Carbon Conference <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 4:58 AM
Subject: The Green Carbon Conference Newsletter - 1
To: Amir <[log in to unmask]>


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THE GREEN CARBON CONFERENCE NEWSLETTER

2nd December, 2013


“The rise of Climate Smart Agriculture - a solution to Carbon Sequestration in Agricultural Soils”

Since the middle of the 20th century, global agricultural output has kept pace with a rapidly growing population. The current human population of 7 billion will increase to more than 9 billion by 2050, creating a demand for a more diverse diet that requires additional resources to produce it. Ensuring food security in a context of growing population and changing climate is arguably the principal challenge of our time. This adds to the challenge of maintaining and preserving the resilience of both natural and agricultural ecosystems (World Bank, 2010).
  
 The responsibilities of this challenge fall on agriculture, which is the sector of the global economy that is highly vulnerable to climate change conditions and needs to adapt to the effects of global warming. Overall, warming and drying may reduce crop yields by 10–20% to 2050, but there are places where losses are likely to be much more severe. Increasing frequencies of heat stress, drought and flooding events will result in yet further deleterious effects on crop and livestock productivity (Jones and Thronton, 2008). At the same time, agriculture and the changes in land-use that are associated with it, are one of the principal contributors to climate change. They are rightly recognized as source of considerable emissions, accounting for one-third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with associated opportunities for mitigation. Future agricultural productivity is critical, as it will shape emissions from conversion of native landscapes to food and biofuel crops. Further yield improvements should therefore be prominent among efforts to reduce future GHG emissions (Burney et al., 2010).
             
 As efforts to mitigate climate change increase while enhancing food security and preserving the natural resource base and vital ecosystem services, there is a need to identify cost- effective ways to avoid emissions of GHGs. The triple imperatives of increasing productivity, reducing emissions, and enhancing resilience to climate change call for alternative approaches to practicing agriculture.
Food security and climate change can be addressed together by Climate- Smart Agriculture (CSA). CSA seeks to increase productivity in an environmentally and socially sustainable way, strengthen farmers’ resilience to climate change, and reduce agriculture’s contribution to climate change by reducing GHG emissions and increasing soil carbon storage (World Bank, 2010).
The CSA approach is designed to identify and operationalize sustainable agricultural development within the explicit parameters of climate change. CSA brings together practices, policies and institutions that are not necessarily new but are used in the context of climatic changes, which are unfamiliar to farmers, herders and fishers. What is also new is the fact that the multiple challenges faced by agriculture and food systems are addressed simultaneously, which helps avoid counterproductive policies, legislation or financing (FAO, 2013). One of the key elements of CSA is sustainable land management (SLM) involving the implementation of land-use systems and management practices that enable humans to maximize the economic and social benefits from land while maintaining or enhancing the ecosystem services from land resources. SLM practices provides carbon benefits through three key processes: carbon conservation, reduced emissions, and carbon sequestration. Increasing soil organic carbon stand central to most SLM techniques as it can reverse soil fertility deterioration, the fundamental cause of declining crop productivity (World Bank, 2010).
Sustainable land management delivers carbon benefits in three important ways.
  1. Carbon conservation, in which the large volumes of carbon stored in natural forests, grasslands, and wetlands remain stored as carbon stocks. Conserving this terrestrial carbon represents a “least-cost opportunity” in terms of climate change adaptation and mitigation and is essential to increasing the resilience of agricultural ecosystems.
  2. Carbon sequestration, in which the growth of agricultural and natural biomass actively removes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it in soil.
  3. Reduce the emissions of GHGs that emanate from agricultural production, including those emissions that result from land-use change in which carbon stocks become carbon sources as agricultural production expands into natural ecosystems.
Even though, there has been a rapid uptake of the term CSA, implementing this approach is still challenging. Climate-smart interventions, such as SLM practices, are highly location-specific and knowledge-intensive.  Considerable efforts are required to develop the knowledge and capacities to make CSA a reality. In large part, these are the same efforts required for achieving sustainable agricultural development which have been advocated over past decades, yet still insufficiently realized on the ground. CSA offers an opportunity to revitalize these efforts, overcome adoption barriers, while also adjusting them to the new realities of climate change. By adopting improved land management practices to increase soil carbon, farmers can increase crop yields, reduce rural poverty, limit GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, and reduce the impact of climate change on agricultural ecosystems (FAO, 2013).
 
By Marie-Laure Dewit

REFERENCES:

THE WORLD BANK, 2012. Economic and Sector Work- Carbon Sequestration in Agricultural Soils. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/International Development Association or The World Bank.
BURNEY, J.A., DAVIS, S.J., LOBELL, D.B., 2010. Greenhouse Gas Mitigation by Agricultural Intensification. PNAS, 107 (26), pp. 12052-12057.
JONES P.G. THORNTON P.K. 2008. Croppers to livestock keepers: Livelihood transitions to 2050 in Africa due tu Climate Change. Environmental Science and Policy, 12 (4), pp. 427-437.
FAO, 2013. Climate- Smart Agriculture for development. FAO [online]. 4 June. Available from http://www.fao.org/climatechange/climatesmart/en/ [Accessed 12 November 2013].

 

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