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In addition to news, interviews and media advisories, the FAO News and Media office is now distributing real-life stories of farmers, pastoralists, fisher folks, indigenous peoples, forest dwellers and others in the sector.
News agencies and media outlets are welcome to reproduce and reuse these stories and related photos with proper credit given. A link back to the original story is also appreciated.
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The exquisite flavour of carbon neutrality Moving towards carbon neutral tea to benefit both the environment and livelihoods
“In China, tea is not just an agricultural product, it also has a meaning in Chinese culture,” so it is an ideal commodity with which “to try to promote the idea that people can make their
own individual contribution to curbing climate change” by their consumer choices, says Professor Yinlong Xu of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS).
The prospect has been steadily gaining ground over the last few years since FAO and the CAAS carried out a pilot project beginning in 2017. The collaboration focused on three separate tea-growing
areas of the country, aiming to map out guidelines for producing low carbon or carbon neutral tea.
Carried out in Dabu in southern China’s Guangdong Province and Longquan and Songyang in the eastern province of Zhejiang, the pilots set out to calculate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
generated by tea production and assess the potential for mitigation and carbon sequestration. These suggested a range of possible measures such as making use of straw and manure in the tea cultivation process, improving the use of fertilizers, planting trees
to provide more shade, introducing multi-cropping practices and using more renewable energy. They also explored what would be needed to replicate the model in other countries and investigated possible approaches to low carbon or carbon neutral tea certification.
The initiative in the East African country would be “significant because right now the only teas that have some claim to being low carbon are initiatives of companies, not whole country ones,”
says FAO carbon-neutral commodities and climate action specialist, Dorota Buzon.
Prior to the pilot study in China, there had been a dearth of research examining the carbon footprint of the entire tea value chain, from growing the tea bushes to boiling the water for the
brew.
“We tried to exploit the synergy of adaptation and mitigation for sustainable tea production,” says Xu. “So the pilot project in China cannot be understood as just for low carbon or carbon
neutrality. Adapting tea production to cope with the negative impact of climate change is essential.”
For tea growers, all this promises better solutions to the vulnerability of their crop when facing extreme temperatures and erratic rainfall, as well as the prospect of better prices for a
commodity meeting the emerging standards.
This prospect underlines the role of tea in transforming agrifood systems and opening the way to better livelihoods for the millions of people who depend on it.
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(+39) 06 570 53625 This email was issued by the Media Office at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
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