*Global CA-CoP* *CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE*

*for sustainable agriculture and land management*

Dear Subscribers,

Please see herebelow a message from David Duthie of Bioplan group (jointly
run by UNDP and UNEP) regarding the Convention on Biological Diversity
COP15 meeting in Kunming, China in October, closely followed by the the
UNFCCC COP25 in Glasgow, UK in November. .

Apologies for any cross-posting.

*Amir Kassam *

*Moderator*

*Global CA-CoP*

e-mail: [log in to unmask]

URL: http://www.fao.org/conservation-agriculture



*Conservation Agriculture is an ecosystem approach to regenerative
sustainable agriculture and land management based on the practical
application of context-specific and locally adapted three interlinked
principles of: (i) Continuous no or minimum mechanical soil disturbance
(no-till seeding/planting and weeding, and minimum soil disturbance with
all other farm operations including harvesting);  (ii) permanent
maintenance of soil mulch cover (crop biomass, stubble and cover crops);
and (iii) diversification of cropping system (economically, environmentally
and socially adapted rotations and/or sequences and/or associations
involving annuals and/or perennials, including legumes and cover crops),
along with other complementary good agricultural production and land
management practices. Conservation Agriculture systems are present in all
continents, involving rainfed and irrigated systems including annual
cropland systems, perennial systems, orchards and plantation systems,
agroforestry systems, crop-livestock systems, pasture and rangeland
systems, organic production systems and rice-based systems. Conservation
Tillage, Reduced Tillage and Minimum Tillage are not Conservation
Agriculture, and nor is No-Till on its own* (more at:
http://www.fao.org/conservation-agriculture).
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: David Duthie <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2020 at 22:23
Subject: Australia’s Red Queen and the Pyrocene
To: bioplan <[log in to unmask]>
Dear BIOPLANNERS,Apologies for the slow start to 2020, a pivotal year we
are constantly being told, with the Convention on Biological Diversity
COP15 meeting in Kunming, China in October, closely followed by the US
Presidential election and the UNFCCC COP25 in Glasgow, UK in
November.Preparation
for the biodiversity meeting are well underway and a zero draft of a
post-2020 global biodiversity framework has been posted here
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbd.int%2Fconferences%2Fpost2020%2Fwg2020-02%2Fdocuments&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725184716&sdata=QBoqr10kWv69eEkM8GqH2X5JxtfVhdfHmitFUqAm7x0%3D&reserved=0>
 in all six UN official languages.I am sure that none of you have missed
the media coverage of the wildfires in Australia, but there is a good
summary, from New Scientist, of the overall impact, including on
biodiversity, here
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fmg24532643-200-australias-fires-are-a-wake-up-call-lets-reduce-fossil-fuel-use%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725194710&sdata=KWfqKkF8TH4eo41thkbQ0KjqlrOUZM3wavxhdTU9YIM%3D&reserved=0>
 and here
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fmg24532643-500-australian-government-report-predicted-severe-wildfires-11-years-ago%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725194710&sdata=H4cB5pfla0aV5AFC9AC3XD5I57vGCxH%2FuGCWpfpr7A0%3D&reserved=0>.
As this article
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.smh.com.au%2Fpolitics%2Ffederal%2Fgreenhouse-gas-emissions-flatline-as-drought-and-renewables-offset-lng-20191129-p53fdl.html&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725204702&sdata=u5Q%2BSCbAlmWAV0XCAZe53cimBX2vt0qWq%2Fl9XOSaek8%3D&reserved=0>
 and graphic
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FEN2nrRoWsAIhDg5.jpg&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725204702&sdata=Lyoela8A3yRBwrX1XUO9IaXZdwGBdev779LriO8HEMc%3D&reserved=0>
 demonstrate, Australia’s climate mitigation efforts, already considered
inadequate to meet her Paris commitments, are getting to the point where,
just like the Red Queen in “Alice Through The Looking Glass”, “it takes all
the running you can do, to keep in the same place”- and are in danger of
becoming a Michael Jackson backsliding moonwalk
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Db6pomaq30Gg&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C0%7C637147052725214697&sdata=uTMHlhIYcFROwgqNgUo2uwxl5MLmIVFluMLIIjk8OyE%3D&reserved=0>
.Below my signature, I am pasting a nice short essay on the latest addition
to my collection of “-cenes” – the Pyrocene. And staying with the “fire”
theme, I enjoyed this interview
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au%2Fblog%2Fyour-pm-is-an-arsonist-an-interview-with-climate-expert-dr-saleemul-huq%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725224700&sdata=vVhAAYpeWL%2FdEfECQl7FmPtL4bDdQ%2B5UbTPWz9tJ8%2BI%3D&reserved=0>
 with the Bangladeshi climate expert, Dr Saleemul Huq, demonstrating how to
channel anger into positive adaptation action.Finally, in this first post
of the year, the Global Risk Report 2020
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oliverwyman.com%2Fcontent%2Fdam%2Foliver-wyman%2Fv2%2Fpublications%2F2020%2FJanuary%2FGlobal_Risks_Report_2020.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725224700&sdata=1UwW649FYaPybxGFW%2B%2BEj2ISlkTMTbd0%2BUof0bA29T4%3D&reserved=0>
 has just been released in the run-up to the World Economic Forum meeting
in Davos, Switzerland next month, with five of the top seven risks
identified being environmental, including biodiversity loss. You can
download the full report here
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oliverwyman.com%2Fcontent%2Fdam%2Foliver-wyman%2Fv2%2Fpublications%2F2020%2FJanuary%2FGlobal_Risks_Report_2020.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725234690&sdata=rjbs2QfXDbrjI4bvnCX8E3Aj6h5mdkIVR1ApXoVrhZc%3D&reserved=0>
, and a useful summary of the main findings can be accessed here
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oliverwyman.com%2Four-expertise%2Finsights%2F2020%2Fjan%2Fglobalrisks2020.html&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725234690&sdata=SJ3jrVi%2BEql50pRhjUrZSnhIM%2Fib3jzkc6DZCoU%2BjxY%3D&reserved=0>
.It looks like being an "interesting" year!Best wishesDavid Duthie

****************

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****************

*Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.*

by Steve Pyne



August 2019



Steve Pyne, emeritus professor at Arizona State University, is the author
of the recently updated and revised *Fire: A Brief History *(University of
Washington Press).



https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/172842
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhistorynewsnetwork.org%2Farticle%2F172842&data=02%7C01%7Cbioplan%40groups.undp.org%7Cc50e1d06f7d946088a6608d799de6215%7Cb3e5db5e2944483799f57488ace54319%7C0%7C1%7C637147052725244683&sdata=A8GjrX%2Fobq2rN4%2FjnlWuvid0u6heDgJatf5Uh3eTnXc%3D&reserved=0>



Millions of acres are burning in the Arctic, thousands of fires blaze in
the Amazon, and with seemingly endless flareups in between, from California
to Gran Canaria – fire seems everywhere, and everywhere dangerous and
destabilizing. With a worsening climate, the fires dappling Earth from the
tropics to the tundra appear as the pilot flames of an advancing
apocalypse.  To some commentators, so dire, so unprecedented are the
forecast changes that they argue we have no language or narrative to
express them.



Actually, the fire scene is worse than the headlines and breathless
commentaries suggest because it is not just about bad burns that crash into
towns and trash countrysides.  It’s equally about the good fires that have
vanished because they are suppressed or no longer lit.  More of the world
suffers from a famine of good fires than from a surfeit of bad ones; the
bad ones are filling a void; they are not so much wild as feral.



Underwriting both is that immense inflection in which humans turned from
burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones in the form of fossil
fuels.  That is the Big Burn of today, acting as a performance enhancer on
all aspects of fire’s global presence.  So vast is the magnitude of these
changes that we might rightly speak of a coming Fire Age equivalent in
stature to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene.  Call it the Pyrocene.



So there does exist a narrative, one of the oldest known to humanity, and
one that has defined our distinctive ecological agency. It’s the story of
fire.  Earth is a uniquely fire planet – it has been since life clambered
onto the continents.  Equally, humans are a uniquely fire creature, not
only the keystone species for fire but a species monopolist over its
manipulation.  The fires in the Arctic testify to the planetary antiquity
of fire.  Nearly all are kindled by lightning and burn biotas nicely
adapted to fire; many could be suppressed, but extinguishing them will only
put off, not put out, the flames. By contrast, the fires in the Amazon bear
witness to a Faustian pact that hominins made with fire so long ago it is
coded into our genome.  They are set by people in circumstances that people
made, well outside ecological barriers and historical buffers.



This is a narrative so ancient it is prelapsarian. Our alliance with fire
has become a veritable symbiosis.  We got small guts and big heads because
we learned to cook food.  We went to the top of the food chain because we
learned to cook landscapes.  Now we have become a geological force because
we have begun to cook the planet.  We have taken fire to places and times
it could never have reached on its own, and it has taken us everywhere,
even off world. We have leveraged fire; fire has leveraged us.



How this happened is a largely hidden history – hidden in plain
sight.  Fire disappeared as an integral subject about the time we hid fire
into Franklin stoves and steam engines.  (The only fire department at a
university is the one that sends emergency vehicles when an alarm
sounds.)  It lost standing as a topic in its own right.  As with the fires
of today, its use in history has been to illustrate other themes, not to
track a narrative of its own.



Yet how the present scene came to be is clear enough in its general
contours.  How, outfitted with firesticks early humans could take over
select biotas.  How, with axes and plows and livestock as fire fulcrums,
societies could recode the patches and pulses of vast swathes of land for
agriculture.  How, hungering for ever more firepower, we turned from
burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones – once-living biomass
converted over eons into oil, gas, lignite, and coal.  Our firepower became
unbounded.



That is literally true.  The old quest for sources has morphed into one for
sinks.  The search for more stuff to burn has become a problem of where to
put all the effluent.  Industrial combustion can burn without any of the
old ecological checks-and-balances: it can burn day and night, winter and
summer, through drought and deluge.  We are taking stuff out of the
geologic past and unleashing it into the geologic future.



It’s not only about changing climate, or acidifying oceans. It’s about how
we live on the land. Land use is the other half of the modern dialectic of
fire on Earth, and when a people shift to fossil-fuels, they alter the way
they inhabit landscapes.  They rely on industrial pyrotechnologies to
organize agriculture, transportation, urban patterns, even nature reserves,
all of which tend to aggravate the hazards from bad fire and complicate the
reintroduction of good fire. The many conflagrations sparked by powerlines
nicely capture the pyric collision between living and lithic
landscapes. Still, even if fossil-fuel combustion were tamed, we would yet
have to work through our deranged relationship to fires on living
landscapes.



Because fire is a reaction, not a substance, the scale of our fire-induced
transformations can be difficult to see.  But we are fashioning the
fire-informed equivalents of ice sheets, mountain glaciers, pluvial lakes,
outwash plains, and of course changing sea levels, not to mention sparking
wholesale extinctions.  Too much bad fire, too little good, too much
combustion overall - it’s an ice age for fire.  The Pyrocene is moving from
metaphor to descriptor.



It’s all there: narrative, analogue, explication.  A couple of centuries
ago we began hiding our fires in machines and off site, which can make it
difficult for modern urbanites to appreciate how profoundly anthropogenic
fire practices inform Earth today.  We use the rampaging flames to animate
other agendas, not to understand what fire is telling us.  But fire, the
great shape-shifter, is fast morphing beyond our grasp.



What does a full-blown fire age look like?  We’re about to find out.

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