How Caring for Our Soils Helps Fight Climate Change

By Katrin Glatzel, Originally posted on Agrilinks.org, Dec 10th 2015

As the International Year of Soils comes to an end, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been passed and COP21 is wrapping up in Paris, it is time to reflect on the role soils can play in future development agendas.

The decision made at the Rio+20 conference to develop a set of SDGs and the agreement “to strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world in the context of sustainable development” created momentum to discuss the role soils play in the global sustainable development agenda. It also initiated discussions concerning the need to develop clear soil and land indicators, necessary implementation mechanisms, supporting governance instruments, and the role of public participation.

This is now, at least partially, reflected and anchored in SDG goal #15, “Sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, halt biodiversity loss.” Furthermore, the French government’s “4 per 1000” initiative, submitted in spring 2015, is aimed at making agriculture a solution in addressing climate change while advancing food and nutrition security. Specifically, it is based on the premise of sequestering atmospheric carbon in the world’s soils at the rate of 0.4 percent a year.

Smallholder farmers are part of the solution

8 perspectives on the Paris climate deal

Lauded as both an unmitigated success and no more than worthless words, the world’s first comprehensive climate change agreement has divided opinion. Between 30^th November and 11^th December, 196 countries came together in Paris to agree the global action needed to curb rising temperatures. But thoughts on the agreement are not as black and white as they seem. Even when applauded there is acknowledgement that it is not perfect and even when criticised there is some hope that this is the start of something bigger, a united global front in addressing climate change. In this sense the Paris Climate Accord is thought of as:

Climate change and agriculture: solutions from the past or the future?

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Agriculture, being a significant contributor to climate change, will no doubt be on the agenda at COP21 discussions being held in Paris at the moment. Despite being a noted omission from UNFCCC negotiations to date, it is a sector which can’t be ignored if we are to halt climate change. Recent research found that while emissions from Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses (AFOLU) were dropping in terms of their contribution to overall emissions (29% of man-made emissions in the 1990s to 21% in 2010), emissions from agriculture are growing at around 1% per year. Yet there is a lack of public awareness of the magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions from farming. In a global survey by Chatham House less than a third of people surveyed thought that meat and dairy production significantly contributed to climate change, despite it having a larger carbon footprint than the transport sector.

In France the food chain is responsible for approximately 30% of greenhouse gases. Over half originate from agricultural production (the majority of this from methane from livestock and nitrous oxide from soil fertilisation) the remainder from processing, distribution and going to purchase food. In a bid to reduce agriculture-related emissions, supporters of climate-smart agriculture are in Paris to promote the systemic change needed if agriculture is to significantly reduce its role in bringing about climate change. The way in which agriculture should change is the topic of much debate, however.

A recent report, Outsmarting Nature? by the ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation lays out some of the more extreme interventions in biotechnology, which fall under the climate-smart farming agenda. Such synthetic biology approaches include altering plant photosynthesis and releasing “gene drives” to alter natural populations of weeds. In part the report is taking a stand against the world’s largest agro-industrial corporations, many of whom are attending the climate summit as well as against hi-tech, intensive, industrial agriculture, which most would agree we need to move away from. The report claims such technologies, that design and engineer crops for industrial production from scratch, are not only risky for food production but may also fail to tackle climate change as well. Many civil society groups would argue instead for greater support of agroecological, small-scale and peasant farming systems, systems which support millions of smallholder farmers around the world. Although the report is extreme in its views against Big Agribusiness corporations, which they say are responsible for climate change in the first place, it does raise legitimate concerns over our reliance on technology and profit-making solutions instead of tackling the underlying issues, such as exponential economic growth and increasing consumption. It does seem absurd to be chasing technologies that alter the fundamental way in which plants function over transforming agriculture to be more sustainable and environmentally-friendly. Particularly if we assume that techno-fixes will eventually come to the limits of what they can fix.

When considering technological solutions to agricultural climate change mitigation, an important consideration of many civil society groups is “who will benefit?”. In Outsmarting Nature? the benefactor is assumed to be the corporations and their profit margins. Whether this is true is debatable and being a large corporation does not necessarily mean you are not eager to bring about genuine change and benefits for the broader population. What does seem to be the case is that technologies are often only accessible to the relatively well-off. For many smallholder farmers in developing countries even commonly used or small-scale technologies such as fertiliser, drip-irrigation, storage sacks or improved seeds are unaffordable or unavailable.