Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

"Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos.Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

Allan Savory works to promote holistic management in the grasslands of the world.

© 2014

Climate change is clear and present danger, says landmark US report

Climate change has moved from distant threat to present-day danger and no American will be left unscathed, according to a landmark report due to be unveiled on Tuesday.

The National Climate Assessment, a 1,300-page report compiled by 300 leading scientists and experts, is meant to be the definitive account of the effects of climate change on the US. It will be formally released at a White House event and is expected to drive the remaining two years of Barack Obama's environmental agenda.

The findings are expected to guide Obama as he rolls out the next and most ambitious phase of his climate change plan in June – a proposal to cut emissions from the current generation of power plants, America's largest single source of carbon pollution.

The White House is believed to be organising a number of events over the coming week to give the report greater exposure.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," a draft version of the report says. The evidence is visible everywhere from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, it goes on.

"Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between."

The final wording was under review by the White House but the basic gist remained unchanged, scientists who worked on the report said.

On Sunday the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed to try harder to combat climate change. At a meeting of UN member states in Abu Dhabi before a climate change summit in New York on 23 September, Ban said: "I am asking them to announce bold commitments and actions that will catalyse the transformative change we need. If we do not take urgent action, all our plans for increased global prosperity and security will be undone."

Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University and vice-chair of the NCA advisory committee, said the US report would be unequivocal that the effects of climate change were occurring in real-time and were evident in every region of the country.

"One major take-home message is that just about every place in the country has observed that the climate has changed," he told the Guardian. "It is here and happening, and we are not cherrypicking or fearmongering."

The draft report notes that average temperature in the US has increased by about 1.5F (0.8C) since 1895, with more than 80% of that rise since 1980. The last decade was the hottest on record in the US.

Temperatures are projected to rise another 2F over the next few decades, the report says. In northern latitudes such as Alaska, temperatures are rising even faster.

"There is no question our climate is changing," said Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois and a lead author of the assessment. "It is changing at a factor of 10 times more than naturally."

Record-breaking heat – even at night – is expected to produce more drought and fuel larger and more frequent wildfires in the south-west, the report says. The north-east, midwest and Great Plains states will see an increase in heavy downpours and a greater risk of flooding.

"Parts of the country are getting wetter, parts are getting drier. All areas are getting hotter," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change at the US Geological Survey. "The changes are not the same everywhere."

Those living on the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska who have weathered the effects of sea level rise and storm surges can expect to see more. Residents of coastal cities, especially in Florida where there is already frequent flooding during rainstorms, can expect to see more. So can people living in inland cities sited on rivers.

Some changes are already having a measurable effect on food production and public health, the report will say.

John Balbus, senior adviser at the National Institute of Environmenal Health Science and a lead author of the NCA report, said rising temperatures increased the risk of heat stroke and heat-related deaths.

Eugene Takle, convening lead author of the agriculture chapter of the NCA report, and director of the Climate Science programme at Iowa State University, said heatwaves and changes in rainfall had resulted in a levelling off in wheat and corn production and would eventually cause declines.

In California, warmer winters have made it difficult to grow cherries. In the midwest, wetter springs have delayed planting. Invasive vines such as kudzu have spread northward, from the south to the Canadian border.

Some of the effects on agriculture, such as a longer growing season, are positive. But Takle said: "By mid-century and beyond the overall impacts will be increasingly negative on most crops and livestock."

The assessments are the American equivalent of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. This year's report for the first time looks at what America has done to fight climate change or protect people from its consequences in the future.

Under an act of Congress the reports were supposed to be produced every four years, but no report was produced during George W Bush's presidency. More

 

© 2014

Volcanism, Climate and Food Security

Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in Belgium on June 18, 1815, the faraway Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the site of the most devastating volcanic eruption on Earth in thousands of years.

Mt. Tambora

The death toll claimed around 100,000 people, from the thick pyroclastic flows of lava, from the tsunami that struck nearby coasts, and from the thick ash that blanketed South-East Asia’s farmlands, destroyed crops and plunged it into darkness for a week. Both events – Napoleon’s defeat and the eruption – had monumental impacts on human history. But while a library of scholarship has been devoted to Napoleon’s undoing at Waterloo, the scattered writings on Tambora would scarcely fill your in-tray.

This extraordinary geological event took place 199 years ago this week, and on the cusp of its bicentenary Tambora is finally getting its due. With the help of modern scientific instruments and old-fashioned archival detective work, the Tambora 1815 eruption can be conclusively placed among the greatest environmental disasters ever to befall mankind. The floods, droughts, starvation, and disease in the three years following the eruption stem from the volcano’s effects on weather systems, so Tambora stands today as a harrowing case study of what the human costs and global reach might be from runaway climate change.

Tambora’s greatest claim to infamy lies not in the impact it had on what was then the Dutch East Indies (which were terrible enough), but its indirect effects on the disease ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The enormous cloud of sulfate gases Tambora ejected into the atmosphere slowed the development of the Indian monsoon, the world’s largest weather system, for the following two years.

Tambora's eruption was heard 2,oookm
away in Sumatra, and ash fell metres deep

Drought brought on by the eruption devastated crop yields across the Indian sub-continent, but more disastrously gave rise to a new and deadly strain of cholera. Cholera had always been endemic to Bengal, but the bizarre weather of 1816-17 triggered by Tambora’s eruption – first drought, then late, unseasonal flooding – altered the microbial ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The cholera bacterium, which has an unusually adaptive genetic structure highly sensitive to changes in its aquatic environment, mutated into a new strain. This met with no resistance among the local population, and it spread across Asia and eventually the globe. By century’s end, the death toll from Bengal cholera stood in the tens of millions.

Just as the biological disaster known as the Black Death defined the 14th century in Europe and the Near East, so cholera shaped the nineteenth century like no other calamity. Much of our medical science, and our modern public health institutions, originate in the Victorian-era battle against cholera. But only now, thanks to renewed scientific interest in the relation between cholera and climate change, can we make the connection between the worldwide cholera epidemic originating in 1817 and Tambora’s eruption thousands of miles away.

Tambora’s ripple effects were felt across the globe. In southwest China, the outlying mountainous province of Yunnan suffered terribly from the cold volcanic weather, losing crop after crop of rice to bitter winds and flooding rains. The situation was so extreme that desperate Yunnanese resorted to eating white clay, while parents sold their children in the town markets, or killed them out of mercy.

In the aftermath of this three-year famine, Yunnan farmers turned to a more reliable cash crop – opium – to ensure their families’ survival against future disasters. Within a few decades, opium was being grown all across Yunnan, while opium processing technology and expertise drifted south into the remote mountains of modern-day Burma and Laos. The “golden triangle” of international opium production was born.

If the Tambora disaster persists in cultural memory at all, it is as the “Year Without a Summer,” 1816, the most notorious and best chronicled extreme weather event of that century. Snowstorms swept the east coast in June, ensuring the shortest growing season on record. Crowds of desperate and hungry rural folk from Maine and Vermont fled snowfalls of up to 18 inches to the western frontier, which had been spared the worst of Tambora’s weather.

Here grain harvests were fetching sky-high prices on the famine-struck Atlantic market, but after the boom came a shattering bust – the so-called Panic of 1819 – which triggered the first sustained economic depression in US history. East coast speculators had invested hugely in western agriculture post-1816, only to lose their shirts when the similarly-affected European grain markets returned to normal in 1819, and commodity prices plummeted. “Never were such hard times,” wrote Thomas Jefferson of ordinary Americans who, across the country, found themselves “in a condition of unparalleled distress,” persisting well into the 1820s.

As it turns out, however, the indirect ripple effects of Tambora – what climate scientists call “teleconnections” – were even more historically significant. Cholera, opium, and the Panic of 1819 are three examples; another is Arctic exploration.

One of the paradoxical effects of a major tropical eruption is that while the planet in general is cooled by the blanket of volcanic dust that drifts from the equator to the poles, the Arctic itself is drastically warmed owing to changes in wind circulation and north Atlantic ocean currents. This anomaly was only discovered after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the tropical Philippines, the first observed with the benefit of modern climatological instruments.

In 1817 and 1818, the British Admiralty began to receive exciting reports from whaling captains of a remarkable loss of sea ice in around Greenland. Huge icebergs from a broken icepack were spotted floating as far south as Ireland and New York. The prospect of a northwest passage for shipping to the East – a holy grail England had sought since Elizabethan times – beckoned once more. With a generation’s naval captains still hungry for glory but now languishing onshore after the defeat of Napoleon, the Admiralty launched an expensive and ultimately disastrous 50-year-long campaign to chart the elusive northwest passage.

The British could not have known then, of course, that Tambora had caused the Arctic to melt, and that the climatic impacts of a tropical eruption persist for no longer than three years. The Arctic refroze just in time for the arrival of Britain’s first polar expedition under Captain John Ross in 1818. Years of fruitless, icebound sallies into the polar seas culminated in the tragic Franklin expedition of the 1840s, when all hands were lost, and the heroic age of British Arctic exploration came to an end.

It is time to recognise Tambora as the Napoleon of eruptions. The implications – for historians – of a revised, volcanic nineteenth century are immense. As with the global cholera epidemic, and the growth of a Chinese opium empire, Victorian-era polar exploration might not have happened at all, or would have evolved in an entirely different direction, had it not been for Tambora’s climate-wrecking detonation in 1815.

For two long centuries, the connections between this major volcanic disaster and human history have been obscured by two factors: the limitations of scientific knowledge, and by our narrow, anthropocentric vision that seeks out only human causes for human events, neglecting the influence of environmental change. Now, in the 21st century, as we begin to appreciate more profoundly the interdependence of human and natural systems, the lesson of a 200-year-old climate emergency may finally be learned: a changing climate changes everything. More

How would the modern world survive an eruption of this magnitude? Given the relativly low global grain reserves how would we feed affected populations? Editor

 

© 2014

Pakistan has only 30 days of water reserves - researchers

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Inadequate planning is exposing Pakistan to water-related threats from climate change and putting the country’s agriculture, industry and hydropower at risk, water experts say.

Speaking at a water summit in Pakistan recently, they said the country desperately needs more reservoirs to increase its water storage capacity, and they called for conservation awareness campaigns, the introduction of drought-tolerant crop varieties and more economical irrigation.

“The country is gravely vulnerable to water-related (effects) of the changing weather patterns,” said Pakistan’s minister for planning, development and reform, Ahsan Iqbal, in a keynote address at the summit in the nation’s capital.

In December, the World Resources Institute ranked Pakistan among the 36 most water-stressed countries in the world.

Iqbal said that Pakistan needs a minimum storage capacity of 40 percent of the around 115 million acre-feet of water available in the Indus river system throughout the year. But the country’s storage capacity is only 7 percent and is decreasing due to sediment build-up in reservoirs.

This gives Pakistan a stored water supply, adequate to meet its needs, of just 30 days. By contrast, “carryover capacity” in other countries ranges from 200 days in India to 1,000 days in Egypt, he said.

“In Pakistan, planners and policy makers across different sectors, including agriculture and industry, energy and health now have ... a daunting challenge before them of increasing the country’s water storage capacity,” Iqbal said.

The minister urged the finance ministry to explore funding avenues for new water storage projects to boost storage capacity. Many of these are hydroelectric dams, which would also produce power.

THREATS TO HYDROPOWER, AGRICULTURE

But Pakistan Water Partnership’s country director, Pervaiz Amir, warned that if climate change leads to lower water flows in the northwest of the country, it would cut the amount of hydroelectricity that can be produced.

More variable rainfall and glacier melt in the face of climate change also means that agriculture, which he said accounts for over 96 percent of the country’s water consumption, will be affected, Amir said.

Without more facilities to divert and store water, heavy rainfall and flooding in some parts of the country will continue to damage crops, increase soil erosion and delay planting and harvesting, he said.

Pakistan ranks ninth among countries most affected by floods, according to UN-Water’s World Water Development Report.

Arun Shrestha, a senior climate change specialist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), said that many South Asian countries lack preparedness for water-related hazards, including flood, droughts and glacial lake outburst floods, and instead focus mainly on post-disaster relief.

What is “more appalling,” he said, is that climate change is dealt with as a separate problem rather than integrated into planning for water-related areas of the government and economy including agriculture, industry, health and energy.

Shrestha urged South Asian countries to include disasters attributable to climate change in their respective water-related planning and policies.

He called for them to analyse their vulnerabilities to increasingly frequent flooding, droughts and glacial lake outburst floods, and to share the findings with each other to develop a regional action plan for dealing with climate-related disasters.

Shrestha underlined the need for regional coordination between government agencies so that river basins can be managed more efficiently, for example by sharing data about river flows.

Stephen Davies, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that water, food and energy are closely interconnected, yet energy models do not properly address water constraints in South Asia and other regions.

Industrial growth and accelerating urbanisation are creating greater demand for energy, he said, but efforts to expand hydropower generation are being hampered by the shrinking availability of water.

Limitations on water availability also are impacting food production to meet the country’s galloping population growth, he added.

Chief executive of LEAD Pakistan and climate policy expert Tauqeer Ali Sheikh urged policymakers to incorporate the interdependence of water, food and energy into their planning.

In South Asia, “energy planning is often made without taking into account possible changes in water availability due to climate change or other water competing uses,” he pointed out. More

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio are climate change and development reporters based in Islamabad, Pakistan.

 

© 2014

Years of Living Dangerously Premiere Full Episode

Years of Living Dangerously Premiere Full Episode

Published on Apr 6, 2014 •

Hollywood celebrities and respected Journalists span the globe to explore the issues of climate change and cover intimate stories of human triumph and tragedy. Watch new episodes Sundays at 10PM ET/

PT, only on SHOWTIME.

Official site: http://www.sho.com/yearsoflivingdangerously

The Years Project: http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/

Follow: https://twitter.com/YEARSofLIVING

Like: https://www.facebook.com/YearsOfLiving

Watch on Showtime Anytime: http://s.sho.com/1 hoirn4

It's the biggest story of our time. Hollywood's brightest stars and today's most respected journalists explore the issues of climate change and bring you intimate accounts of triumph and tragedy. YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY takes you directly to the heart of the matter in this awe-inspiring and cinematic documentary series event from

Executive Producers James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

© 2014

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

World agriculture is now facing challenges unlike any before. Producing enough grain to make it to the next harvest has challenged farmers ever since agriculture began, but now the challenge is deepening as new trends—falling water tables, plateauing grain yields, and rising temperatures—join soil erosion to make it difficult to expand production fast enough.

As a result, world grain carryover stocks have dropped from an average of 107 days of consumption a decade or so ago to 74 days in recent years.

World food prices have more than doubled over the last decade. Those who live in the United States, where 9 percent of income goes for food, are largely insulated from these price shifts. But how do those who live on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder cope? They were already spending 50–70 percent of their income on food. Many were down to one meal a day before the price rises. Now millions of families routinely schedule one or more days each week when they will not eat at all.

What happens with the next price surge? Belt tightening has worked for some of the poorest people so far, but this cannot go much further. Spreading food unrest will likely lead to political instability. We could see a breakdown of political systems. Some governments may fall.

As food supplies have tightened, a new geopolitics of food has emerged—a world in which the global competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is fending for itself. We cannot claim that we are unaware of the trends that are undermining our food supply and thus our civilization. We know what we need to do.

There was a time when if we got into trouble on the food front, ministries of agriculture would offer farmers more financial incentives, like higher price supports, and things would soon return to normal. But responding to the tightening of food supplies today is a far more complex undertaking. It involves the ministries of energy, water resources, transportation, and health and family planning, among others. Because of the looming specter of climate change that is threatening to disrupt agriculture, we may find that energy policies will have an even greater effect on future food security than agricultural policies do. In short, avoiding a breakdown in the food system requires the mobilization of our entire society.

On the demand side of the food equation, there are four pressing needs—to stabilize world population, eradicate poverty, reduce excessive meat consumption, and reverse biofuels policies that encourage the use of food, land, or water that could otherwise be used to feed people. We need to press forward on all four fronts at the same time.

The first two goals are closely related. Indeed, stabilizing population depends on eliminating poverty. Even a cursory look at population growth rates shows that the countries where population size has stabilized are virtually all high-income countries. On the other side of the coin, nearly all countries with high population growth rates are on the low end of the global economic ladder.

The world needs to focus on filling the gap in reproductive health care and family planning while working to eradicate poverty. Progress on one will reinforce progress on the other. Two cornerstones of eradicating poverty are making sure that all children—both boys and girls—get at least an elementary school education and rudimentary health care. And the poorest countries need a school lunch program, one that will encourage families to send children to school and that will enable them to learn once they get there.

Shifting to smaller families has many benefits. For one, there will be fewer people at the dinner table. It comes as no surprise that a disproportionate share of malnutrition is found in larger families.

At the other end of the food spectrum, a large segment of the world’s people are consuming animal products at a level that is unhealthy and contributing to obesity and cardiovascular disease. The good news is that when the affluent consume less meat, milk, and eggs, it improves their health. When meat consumption falls in the United States, as it recently has, this frees up grain for direct consumption. Moving down the food chain also lessens pressure on the earth’s land and water resources. In short, it is a win-win-win situation.

Another initiative, one that can quickly lower food prices, is the cancellation of biofuel mandates. There is no social justification for the massive conversion of food into fuel for cars. With plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars coming to market that can run on local wind-generated electricity at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 80¢ per gallon, why keep burning costly fuel at four times the price?

On the supply side of the food equation, we face several challenges, including stabilizing climate, raising water productivity, and conserving soil. Stabilizing climate is not easy, but it can be done if we act quickly. It will take a huge cut in carbon emissions, some 80 percent within a decade, to give us a chance of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. This means a wholesale restructuring of the world energy economy.

The easiest way to do this is to restructure the tax system. The market has many strengths, but it also has some dangerous weaknesses. It readily captures the direct costs of mining coal and delivering it to power plants. But the market does not incorporate the indirect costs of fossil fuels in prices, such as the costs to society of global warming. Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, noted when releasing his landmark study on the costs of climate change that climate change was the product of a massive market failure.

The goal of restructuring taxes is to lower income taxes and raise carbon taxes so that the cost of climate change and other indirect costs of fossil fuel use are incorporated in market prices. If we can get the market to tell the truth, the transition from coal and oil to wind, solar, and geothermal energy will move very fast. If we remove the massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, we will move even faster. 10

Although to some people this energy transition may seem farfetched, it is moving ahead, and at an exciting pace in some countries. For example, four states in northern Germany now get at least 46 percent of their electricity from wind. For Denmark, the figure is 26 percent. In the United States, both Iowa and South Dakota now get one fifth of their electricity from wind farms. Solar power in Europe can now satisfy the electricity needs of some 15 million households. Kenya now gets one fifth of its electricity from geothermal energy. And Indonesia is shooting for 9,500 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity by 2025, which would meet 56 percent of current electricity needs. More

 

© 2014

Cary Fowler on Food Security - TED Talk

Cary Fowler served as the Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust from 2005 to 2012.^[8] The trust's mandate is to ensure "the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide." Fowler was influential in the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which currently houses samples of more than 783,000 distinct crop varieties. He stepped down as Executive Director of the trust in late 2012 but continues to serve in an advisory role and chairs the International Advisory Council of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.^[4][8]

Working with partner genebanks in 71 countries during Fowler's tenure as Executive Director, the Trust helped rescue 83,393 unique crop varieties from extinction. It sponsored more than 40 projects to screen crop collections for important traits such as heat and drought tolerance. In partnership with the USDA, a state-of-the-art genebank management system ("GRIN-Global") was developed and made available to 38 genebanks internationally, and the first ever global portal to accession (sample) level information (Genesys)^[9] was launched. The Trust's endowment grew more than $100 million to $134 million, and total funds raised surpassed $200 million.^[10][11]

By the end of Fowler's tenure, the Trust concluded three major agreements intended to protect and conserve crop diversity: with the Millennium Seed Bank of Kew Gardens,^[12] the indigenous communities in the Andes,^[13] and the international genebanks of the Consultive Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).^[14]

One example given here is for South Asia where we must pay attention from a food security perspective. Editor

© 2014

‘China a concern for South and Central Asia’s water security’

New Delhi: With China building a “cascade of dams” in the upper reaches of rivers that flow into Central and South Asia and drawing large amounts of water to sustain its economy and people, there is a need to engage the Asian giant at bilateral and multilateral fora on the issue of water that is fast becoming a scarce and contentious commodity, said diplomats and experts here.

Himalayas - Source of S. Asia's water

Addressing a round table on “Regional Water Security and Riverine Disputes: Issues Common to Central and South Asia” here Thursday, speakers, including ambassadors from Central Asian countries and other domain experts, also said that there is a need for Track II dialogue between civil society activists of countries and for transparency in sharing of hydro information in order to resolve the issues concerning sharing of water.

Leading strategic expert Brahma Chellaney said Central and South Asia share common water security issues. He said China is “happily placed” as it is home to the largest number of trans-border rivers, which all originate from the Tibetan Plateau and the Xinjiang region. Chellaney said China’s “annexation” of Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang “changed the water discourse” for the people of South and Central Asia.

Chellaney, who is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, said China “is an issue of concern in South Asia and Central Asia… China is building a cascade of dams just before the rivers flow out of its territory.”

Ajay Bisaria, joint secretary in the Eurasia division of the external affairs ministry, said that India stands to benefit from the Central Asia South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project, better known as CASA-1000, a new electricity transmission system to connect the countries of hydropower producing countries of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ashok Sajjanhar, former ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the Aral Sea from being a lake of plenty with fish, birds and wildlife, has turned into an “ecological disaster” with very high salinity and water level shrunk massively. The Aral Sea is a lake lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Sajjanhar said the issue of water distribution and water management between countries sharing water bodies is very crucial.

Rajiv Dogra, former ambassador, said the Central Asian water bodies were once clear blue and pristine, but have shrunk due to overuse.

“A drop of water is a grain of gold”, is the value placed on water in Turkmenistan, said the country’s Ambassador Parakhat Hommadovich Durdyev at the seminar held at the India International Centre and organised by the think tank Society for Policy Studies in collaboration with Asia News Agency.

William Young, Lead Resource, South Asian Water Initiative, World Bank, said the Ganga plains is inhabited by 600 million people, which shows the dependency on the river. He said the World Bank was looking to establish dialogues for the Ganga and Brahmaputra basin river countries.

Sanjoy Hazarika, director of Centre for North East Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, said the run of river dams that China was building on the Brahmaputra removes the fertile silt from the river water when it is released downstream into India, thereby harming agriculture and leading to climate change.

Hazarika also slammed the idea of interlinking of rivers being proposed in India, terming it a disastrous idea. More

 

©

Can The World Feed China? by Lester Brown

Overnight, China has become a leading world grain importer, set to buy a staggering 22 million tons in the 2013–14 trade year, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture projections. As recently as 2006—just eight years ago—China had a grain surplus and was exporting 10 million tons. What caused this dramatic shift?

Lester Brown

It wasn’t until 20 years ago, after I wrote an article entitled “Who Will Feed China?”, that I began to fully appreciate what a sensitive political issue food security was to the Chinese. The country’s leaders were all survivors of the Great Famine of 1959–61, when some 36 million people starved to death. Yet while the Chinese government was publicly critical of my questioning the country’s ability to feed itself, it began quietly reforming its agriculture. Among other things, Beijing adopted a policy of grain self-sufficiency, an initiative that is now faltering.

Since 2006, China’s grain use has been climbing by 17 million tons per year. (See data.) For perspective, this compares with Australia’s annual wheat harvest of 24 million tons. With population growth slowing, this rise in grain use is largely the result of China’s huge population moving up the food chain and consuming more grain-based meat, milk, and eggs.

In 2013, the world consumed an estimated 107 million tons of pork—half of which was eaten in China. China’s 1.4 billion people now consume six times as much pork as the United States does. Even with its recent surge in pork, however, China’s overall meat intake per person still totals only 120 pounds per year, scarcely half the 235 pounds in the United States. But, the Chinese, like so many others around the globe, aspire to an American lifestyle. To consume meat like Americans do, China would need to roughly double its annual meat supply from 80 million tons to 160 million tons. Using the rule of thumb of three to four pounds of grain to produce one pound of pork, an additional 80 million tons of pork would require at least 240 million tons of feedgrain.

Where will this grain come from? Farmers in China are losing irrigation water as aquifers are depleted. The water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling fast, by over 10 feet per year in some areas. Meanwhile, water supplies are being diverted to nonfarm uses and cropland is being lost to urban and industrial construction. With China’s grain yield already among the highest in the world, the potential for China to increase production within its own borders is limited.

The 2013 purchase by a Chinese conglomerate of the American firm Smithfield Foods Inc., the world’s largest pig-growing and pork-processing company, was really a pork security move. So, too, is China’s deal with Ukraine to provide $3 billion in loans in exchange for corn, as well as negotiations with Ukrainian companies for access to land. Such moves by China exemplify the new geopolitics of food scarcity that affects us all.

China is not alone in the scramble for food. An estimated 2 billion people in other countries are also moving up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock products. The combination of population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of one third of the U.S. grain harvest into ethanol to fuel cars is expanding the world demand for grain by a record 43 million tons per year, double the annual growth of a decade ago.

The world’s farmers are struggling to keep pace. When grain supplies tightened in times past, prices rose and farmers responded by producing more. Now the situation is far more complex. Water shortages, soil erosion, plateauing crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and climate change pose mounting threats to production.

As China imports increasing quantities of grain, it is competing directly with scores of other grain-importing countries, such as Japan, Mexico, and Egypt. The result will be a worldwide rise in food prices. Those living on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder—people who are already struggling just to survive—will find it even more difficult to get by. Low-income families trapped by food price inflation will be unable to afford enough food to eat every day.

The world is transitioning from an era of abundance to one dominated by scarcity. China’s turn to the outside world for massive quantities of grain is forcing us to recognize that we are in trouble on the food front. Can we reverse the trends that are tightening food supplies, or is the world moving toward a future of rising food prices and political unrest? More

 

Webinar: Opportunities and Challenges for Rural Off-Grid Lighting and Distribution Markets in India

Webinar: Opportunities and Challenges for Rural Off-Grid Lighting and Distribution Markets in India

5 March 2014

9:00 a.m. EST | 3:00 p.m. CET

 

The United Nations Foundation's Energy Access Practitioner Network, in partnership with the Clean Energy Solutions Center, is hosting a no-cost, webinar-based training about the challenges and opportunities within India's rural off-grid lighting and distribution markets. Panelists will discuss energy access initiatives being undertaken in India by the UN Foundation as part of the UN and World Bank's Sustainable Energy for All initiative.

Anjali Garg and Praveen Kumar will provide an overview of the IFC's Lighting Asia/India program and discuss the work being undertaken to effectively address the energy needs of communities in remote rural areas, while promoting local entrepreneurship and sustainable rural development.

Ajaita Shah from Frontier Markets will share her experience working with remote rural communities in Rajasthan, India, to provide access to affordable and quality solar solutions to low-income households.

Gaurav Gupta from Dalberg will talk about emerging and innovative distribution models in off-grid renewable energy sectors in India.

The presentations will be followed by an interactive Q&A session that will allow participants to discuss best practices in the lighting and distribution markets in India and whether this work can be scaled and applied to other markets.

To register, please visit https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/313205262.

Author bios can be found at https://cleanenergysolutions.org/training/rural-off-grid-lighting-distribution-markets-india.

 

Brazil rations water in 140 cities amid worst drought in decades

Over 140 Brazilian cities have been pushed to ration water during the worst drought on record, according to a survey conducted by the country's leading newspaper. Some neighborhoods only receive water once every three days.

Water is being rationed to nearly 6 million people living in a total of 142 cities across 11 states in Brazil, the world's leading exporter of soybeans, coffee, orange juice, sugar and beef. Water supply companies told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that the country's reservoirs, rivers and streams are the driest they have been in 20 years. A record heat wave could raise energy prices and damage crops.

Some neighborhoods in the city of Itu in Sao Paulo state (which accounts for one-quarter of Brazil's population and one-third of its GDP), only receive water once every three days, for a total of 13 hours.

Brazil's water utility company Sabesp said on its website that the Cantareira water system (the largest of the six that provide water to nearly half of the 20 million people living in the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo) is at less than 19 percent of its capacity of 1 trillion liters. The company described the situation at Cantareira as"critical": the amount of rain registered in the month to January was the lowest in 84 years. Sabesp said the other five water supply systems in Sao Paulo's metropolitan area were normal for this time of year, however.

The PCJ Consorcio water association said the area would have to see 17 millimeters of rain a day for two months until Cantareira's water level recovers to 50 percent of its capacity.

Average reservoir levels in the southeast and central-west regions, which account for up to three-thirds of Brazil's hydroelectric power generation, fell to 41 percent in late January.

January was the hottest month on record in parts of the country, including in Sao Paulo. The heat, plus a severe drought, has raised concerns over growing water shortages and crop damage. According to Brazil's national meteorological institute INMET, Sao Paulo's average maximum daily temperature so far this year was 31.9 degrees Celsius (89.4 degrees Fahrenheit), a degree hotter than the previous January record and surpassing February 1984 as the city's hottest month ever.

According to the state meteorological agency in Ceara state, the northeast of the country is also experiencing its worst drought in at least 50 years. Hundreds of thousands of cattle have died from heat exhaustion, and farmers are getting desperate. "I have never seen a drought like this,” Ulisses de Sousa Ferraz, an 85-year-old farmer in Pernambuco state, told Reuters, adding that he has lost 50 cows. “Everything has dried up." More

 

The Water Levels Of The Middle East’s Biggest Lake Have Dropped 95 Percent In Two Decades

According to the local environmental office in Iran, only five percent of the water remains in the biggest lake in the Middle East.

Lake Urmia sits in the far northwest corner of Iran, and was once the sixth largest saltwater lake in the world — slightly bigger than Utah’s Great Salt Lake. It’s relatively shallow, so the water drop has exposed huge tracts of land. Hamid Ranaghadr, an Iranian environmental official, told the New York Times that areas of the lake that were once under 30 feet of water are now dry and dusty lake beds. “We just emptied it out,” he said.

Being saltwater, Lake Urmia was never fit for drinking water or agriculture. But its collapse is indicative of the way climate change and poor water management has driven Iran into a potentially catastrophic water shortage. Dam construction recently increased throughout the country, both to provide badly needed electricity and water supplies for irrigation. But that’s also diverted massive amounts of the freshwater that formerly flowed into Lake Urmia. Other major rivers throughout the country have gone dry, and the dust from the riverbeds and the salt from Lake Urmia’s dried basin are now a form of pollution unto themselves. (Four of the world’s ten most polluted cities can be found in Iran.) Major cities around the country — including the capital of Tehran, home to 22 million — are making contingency plans for rationing. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani recently named water as a national security issue, and demonstrations and riots over water supplies have already erupted.

The collapse began in the mid-1990s. One local villager told the Times that he noticed the shoreline receding two decades ago, and now it’s no longer visible from his community. According to a 2012 study by the United Nations, 65 percent of the decline can be chalked up to climate change and the diversion of surface water cutting inflow to the lake. Another 25 percent was due to dams, and 10 percent was due to decreased rainfall over the lake itself.

A long drought in Iran ended two years ago, but the recent boost to rainfall has not been able to offset the other effects on the lake. Average temperatures around Lake Urmia rose three degrees in just the past ten years. In Pakistan, which sits along Iran’s southeast border, has seen its snowmelt and river flow reduced by climate change. That’s led to both political strife domestically, and to a strained relationship with India, which is building dams along the Indus River — Pakistan’s main source of freshwater. And research from the the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany found water resources in northwest Iran could drop 50 percent should global warming increase by just 2°C.

The world is currently on track to blow past 2°C by the end of the century.

After the water is diverted away, a lot of it is used recklessly. Ranaghadr and other experts point to inefficient irrigation techniques such as spraying, which allows most of the water to evaporate uselessly from the fields. His department calculated that around 90 percent of the water that should flow into Lake Urmia is sprayed instead, and President Rouhani has estimated that Iran’s uses 92 percent of its water for agriculture, versus 80 percent in the United States.

“They turn open the tap, flood the land, without understanding that in our climate most of the water evaporates that way,” Ali Reza Seyed Ghoreishi, a member of the local water management council, told the Times. “We need to educate the farmers.”

The Iranian government also attempted to promote agriculture by breaking large landholdings into smaller properties. Most of the new owners promptly dug new wells to supply their crops, draining the groundwater. “There are around 30,000 legally dug wells and an equal amount of illegal wells,” said Seyed Ghoreishi. “As the water is becoming less, they have to dig deeper and deeper.”

Efficient water management generally requires either a working market where prices keep supply and demand tethered, or well-developed public institutions to manage the supply. Unfortunately, the developing world often has neither. A coalition of groups over the United Nations tried to quantify, in dollar terms, water use around the globe in April of 2013. They found West Asia, where Iran can found,was the third-most costly regional user of water in the world, right behind East Asia and North Africa.

Thanks to budget choices and international sanctions, Iran has not made any money available to restoration efforts for Lake Urmia. Iranian officials told the Times the lake is, at this point, probably unsalvageable.