Consuming planet Earth

Since we first saw images of planet Earth from space in 1968, GDP per capita has almost doubled and mean life expectancy has risen from 56 to 69.6 years. These increases in income and health have been coupled with the depletion of natural capital, increased greenhouse gas emissions and increasing hunger and poverty.

As the book, The Limits to Growth, warned in 1972, the earth’s natural capital is limited and at some point we will reach these limits. Rising prices of goods and services as well as break downs in ecosystem services will indicate this threshold has been breached.  And we have passed this checkpoint. Global metrics that measure human impact on earth’s natural resources such as the Human Development Index, Genuine Progress Indicator, Ecological Footprints, and the Happy Planet Index, all indicate that the earth has exceeded its ability to provide resources to meet human demands and that further human consumption is impacting the earth’s ability to provide such services.

A recent paper authored by Jules Pretty of the University of Essex states that “overshoot has already begun to occur, in which more resources are being used than can be regenerated each year. Yet conventional economic growth is still a primary political goal in most countries.” A Royal Society report of 2012 made clear that unrestrained growth will at some point end as the finite limits of our natural resources are reached.

The paper, entitled The Consumption of a Finite Planet: Well-Being, Convergence, Divergence and the Nascent Green Economy, analyses the relationship between such consumption indicators as GDP, CO₂ emissions and meat consumption with well-being across 189 countries and, for three affluent countries, across a time span of 60 years.

Home grown nutrition

The 1,000 day Initiative and Scaling Up Nutrition movement, detailed in Chapter 2, brought to the political fore the serious impacts of child malnutrition, which affects 40% of children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa. Malnutrition early in life not only impacts learning, levels of schooling attained, future earning potential and national economic growth but is a condition which is often passed from mothers to children, persisting across generations.

In a new UK Parliamentary report, Home Grown Nutrition, produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agriculture and Food for Development, agricultural and other pathways to improving nutrition are discussed.

Agriculture and nutrition

Agriculture is a key industry for sub-Saharan Africa and investments in agricultural development are one of the most effective tools to ensure economic, social and political well-being. Smallholder farmers in Africa represent the largest economically productive business sector in the developing world, but they produce only a sixth of the output of farmers in Europe or North America. The potential to increase their productivity is enormous.

Investing in smallholder agriculture can address malnutrition directly through increased incomes and the diversification of food for household consumption. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, research has shown that the biggest limiting factor on food and nutrition security is income. And a diet that meets children’s energy, protein and micronutrient needs for optimal growth and development is four times more expensive than a diet with only adequate calories. Greater income, generated through agriculture, a sector that employs the majority of people in sub-Saharan Africa, can be spent on healthcare, education and, crucially, food.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

New Report Urges a U.S. Global Food Security Focus on Science, Trade and Business, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Pesticides Make a Comeback, The Wall Street Journal

The biodiversity challenge in Europe, Thinking Country

Q+A: Committee on World Food Security chair urges use of forest foods in diets, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Ghana hosts 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week, Joy Online

Trees on farms: challenging conventional agricultural practice, The Guardian

Disasters displaced over 32 mln people in 2012, rising trend forecast, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Feature: Curbing hunger, Ghana must go biotech, Ghana Business News

G8 under pressure to rethink biofuel mandates, EurActiv.com

Melting in the North Pole, South Pole and Third Pole?

So often we hear about the melting of the ice at the North and South Poles. Their rapid decline is a dire warning of further changes to our ecosystems a warming climate might bring as well as a wake-up call that climate change is happening right now. But if a shrinking Arctic and Antarctic aren’t enough to convince you, perhaps a shrinking third pole will.

A recent article in the Economist explores the third largest area of ice on our planet. 46,000 glaciers cover 100,000 square kilometres in Tibet’s plateau and surrounding mountains. While it is only 6% the size of Greenland’s ice cap, another 1.7m square kilometres is permafrost, equivalent to 7% of the permafrost of the Arctic. But the third pole’s significance is its direct relation to people. It is the source of Asia’s 10 biggest rivers, the basins of which are home to about 1.5 billion people, in 12 countries. If this pole were to melt you can imagine that would be a lot of water to deal with, water that would no longer be available year on year.

Despite its social importance, the Tibetan plateau glaciers have yet to be comprehensively studied and, on the nature of their decline, there is conflicting information. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that the Himalaya’s glaciers could disappear by 2035, a figure later strongly contested. Reversely a study published in Nature in 2012 showed that glaciers on the Tibetan plateau were indeed growing. But again these figures were criticised not least for relying on satellite imagery  unable to distinguish between frozen glaciers and glacial lakes. So what is the situation, are Himalayan glaciers advancing or retreating? Well scientists, Dr Yao Tandong of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, in Beijing, Dr Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and Dr Tobias Bolch of the University of Zurich agree that some glaciers are growing, such as those in the west of the region while those in the eastern Himalayas and east of the Tibetan plateau are rapidly declining. Those in the central regions are also decreasing in size but at a less rapid pace.

Forests and insects for food security

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has recently brought attention to two neglected areas of food security: forests and insects.

On the 13th to 15th May 2013 the FAO hosted an International Conference on Forests for Food Security and Nutrition which aimed to increase understanding of the role that forests, trees and agroforestry systems can play in improving the food security and nutrition of rural people. 1985 was designated the year of forests and food security but since then it has disappeared off the international agenda.

Forests, trees and agroforestry are often forgotten in national food security strategies and yet 1.6 billion people rely on forests and other natural systems for food and their livelihoods. Forests and trees are important in a number of ways:

• They provide affordable sources of food, nutrients, fibre and fuelwood as well as sources of income
• They help deliver clean water to agricultural lands by protecting catchments
• Herders in arid and semi-arid lands depend on trees as a source of fodder for their livestock
• Agroforestry can improve productivity, resilience and is a climate-smart agricultural practice.

In order to fully realise the potential of forests in tackling food insecurity, issues of land tenure, access and sustainable extraction need further investigation and policy agencies of agriculture, environment, health, development, nutrition, conservation, land-use planning and forestry require greater integration. Background papers to the conference discuss the role of trees in the livelihoods of the poor and the enabling political environments needed to increase the contribution of forests to food security.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Let’s tackle inequality head on for development after the MDGs, The Guardian

USAID, AfDB, Government of Sweden Announce Agriculture Fast Track, USAID

Forests and food security: back on the global agenda, Thomson Reuters Foundation

The ‘superwheat’ that boosts crops by 30%: Creation of new grain hailed as biggest advance in farming in a generation, The Daily Mail

Managing food price instability: Critical assessment of the dominant doctrine, Galtier, F. 2013

Adesina’s Brazil visit, agricultural transformation agenda and the farmers, Peoples Daily

High-tech: The best solution to take farming to the next level, The Citizen

Food aid for the 21st century (Opinion), Chicago Tribune

What will it take for policymakers to act on climate change?, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Cambridge-based scientists develop ‘superwheat’, BBC News

Where are we on climate change?

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and advisor to the UK government through the Committee on Climate Change, recently gave a talk at Imperial College London on the latest research and actions around climate change.

Global CO₂ levels are currently at 397ppm (parts per million), a level not seen for 4.5 million years. We have increased CO₂ levels in the atmosphere by 40% since the Industrial Revolution. While there has been a clear and significant increase in global temperatures since 1850, we have seen a hiatus on temperature rises in the last decade. While sceptics may use this as evidence to support their claims, a decade of cooler temperatures is not outside the range of predictions from climate models.

Global sea levels are rising 3mm per year. While the melting of the Western Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is contributing around 1mm of this increase, it is unknown how likely this is to accelerate if we reach a threshold point of destabilisation. In the Arctic, recent pictures of the ice cap in mid-September (when it is at its minimum size) show it is half the average size it was in the last century. By 2050-2060 we would expect the arctic ice cap to have vanished come September.

We have seen some significant heat extremes in the past decade: the 2003 European heatwave, 2010 Russian heatwave and more recently the 2012 US drought. Work by NASA scientists Dr James Hansen and colleagues indicates a shift to more frequent and severe bouts of high temperatures. But it is not just heat extremes, as the climate changes we are also seeing cold extremes in certain locations despite remarkable warmth elsewhere. This indicates our ability to predict regional trends is much more limited than our ability to predict global averages and while we may, in the past have viewed climate change as a warming of the planet, now we are trying to understand it as a disruption of our climate systems, one that will have severe and varied results.