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.

Here’s Why We Haven’t Quite Figured Out How to Feed Billions More People, National Geographic

How Much of World’s Greenhouse-Gas Emissions Come From Agriculture?, The Wall Street Journal

Developing countries blast rich-world farm subsidies at Rome talks, Reuters

Unprecedented Case Filed at International Criminal Court Proposes Land Grabbing in Cambodia as a Crime Against Humanity, Huffington Post

Feeding the world. The ultimate first-world conceit, Triple Crisis

Nobel laureates call for a revolutionary shift in how humans use resources, The Guardian

When Can A Big Storm Or Drought Be Blamed On Climate Change?, NPR

A sign of things to come? Examining four major climate-related disasters, 2010 – 2013, and their impacts on food security, Oxfam

4 problems GMO labeling won’t solve, Grist

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.

Study: Earth can sustain more terrestrial plant growth than previously thought, News Bureau, Illinois

Seeds of Truth – A response to The New Yorker, Dr Vandana Shiva

New resource shows half of GMO research is independent, GENERA

UN Draft report lists unchecked emissions’ risks, The New York Times

Specter’s New Yorker GMO Labeling Essay Misses the Mark, Just Label It

Seeking Fertile Ground for a Green Revolution in Africa, PAEPARD

Is soil the new oil in Africa’s quest for sustainable development?, Thomson Reuters Foundation

How the private sector can catalyze innovations for feeding Africa, Devex

The good and bad of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), New Vision

Research is ‘no panacea’ for development, finds DFID, SciDev.Net

14 agricultural infographics – The rise and rise of the infographic part two

Last year we posted a blog article about the role of infographics in communicating policy and advocacy messages in a simple, accessible and powerful way. The trend for the infographic to present big data and hard hitting facts to the masses is still growing and here are some more infographics we think you should take a look at:

1. Oxfam Australia in their infographic, What’s wrong with our food system, look at why so many farmers are hungry.
2. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center documents Advances in global agriculture.
3. Public Health Degree investigate the Two sides of the global food crisis.

4. Online Schools compare Oil fields with corn fields in terms of their productivity and greenhouse gas emissions.
5. The United States Agency for International Development’s infographic, The global state of agriculture, looks ahead to how we must increase food for a growing population.
6. The International Food Policy Research Institute document how conservation agriculture works in Farming for the long haul.
7. Monsanto explores The role of data science in agriculture.
8. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, through their FAOSTAT database, explores Our food and agriculture in numbers. The FAO have also created Genetic resources and biodiversity for food and agriculture.
9. Raconteur presents the facts on Sustainable agriculture.
10. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have created several infographics entitled Simple innovations help African farmers thrive, Growing rice for a hungry world and Making progress on the MDGs.
11. Float Mobile Learning examines how Mobile technologies in North American agriculture have developed and progressed.
12. GSMA M-Agri have published an infographic on the Agricultural productivity gap and the opportunity for mobile.
13. ONE’s, A growing opportunity: Measuring investments in African agriculture, investigates whether promises by governments and donors have been kept.
14. The International Food Policy Research Institute look at Meat: the good, the bad and the complicated.

 

Africa’s Adaptation Gap

A recent technical report published by the UN Environment Programme, the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) and Climate Analytics investigates the impacts of climate change and the costs of adaptation in Africa. Africa’s Adaptation Gap report  is a warning to policymakers of both the implications for Africa should global mitigation activities fall short as well as the urgent need for scaling up adaptation activities and funding in this continent, a region the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report named a “vulnerability hot spot” for the impacts of climate change.

Africa is projected to experience severe climatic changes compared to historical conditions: more frequent extreme weather events; sea level rise of over one metre with global average temperature increases of 4°C by 2100; significant decreases in precipitation across many areas; a loss of biodiversity and potentially grazing area; and maize, millet and sorghum growing areas are likely to become unviable with global average temperature increases of 3°C as growing seasons shorten and optimal heat ranges are exceeded..

The report summarises the estimated costs of adaptation Africa faces under different scenarios:

• With current emissions levels, adaptation costs will be $7 to $15 billion per year to 2020.
• If we close the emissions gap to hold average global temperature increases to below 2°C, costs will be $35 billion per year by 2050 and $200 billion by 2070, although a large degree of uncertainty exists.
• If we continue on our current emissions trajectory, and global average temperatures rise by 3.5-4°C by 2100, adaptation costs could be $50 billion per year by 2050 and $350 billion by 2070.

These adaptation costs will include such things as early warning systems, coastal protection, drought-resistant crops, irrigation, desalinisation and infrastructure protection, and, as the report shows, will be significant even with immediate emissions reductions. The report illustrates the critical link between developed country mitigation activities and the financial burden of adaptation in Africa, a burden that could constrain economic development.

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.

Biosafety of GM Crops in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, CSIS

New African academy to nurture nutritious “orphan” crops, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Some GMO Crops Are on the Same Side as Their Opponents, MIT Technology Review

Farm Researcher CGIAR Budget Rises to $1 Billion in Hunger Fight, Bloomberg

Food security: an urban issue, The Guardian

Lost Freshwater May Double Climate Change Effects On Agriculture, Science Daily

Why we will need genetically modified foods, MIT Technology Review

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.

Disturbing Report Highlights the State of the World’s Oceans, Green Africa Directory

Africa Week Recognizes Development, Governance Progress, IISD

Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa, IMF

From Plates that Grow Food to Certified Cocoa: UN Awards Innovative Green Enterprises at Green Economy Symposium, SEED Initiative

UN highlights role of farming in closing emissions gap, BBC

Farmers dig into soil quality, Nature

An exclusive interview with Bill Gates, The Financial Times

FAO expects more balanced food markets, less price volatility, FAO

Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies, The New York Times

New Effort Launched to Measure and Monitor Global Food Loss and Waste, UNEP

Nitrogen fixation helps double some African farm yields, SciDev.Net

Crop pests spreading polewards under global warming, European Commission

Food waste: ‘Six meals a week’ thrown away by Britons, BBC

We’ll rise or fall on the quality of our soil, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

How complexity thinking cut malnutrition in Vietnam by two thirds, From Poverty to Power, Duncan Green

IPPC 5th Assessment Report

On the 30^th September the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) launched the first part of their 5^th Assessment report, the 4^th having been published in 2007, which analyses and synthesises the latest data, projections and physical evidence for climate change. The dominant message from the report from working group I of the IPCC is that scientists are surer than ever that climate change is due to human related activities.

The contributions of working groups II and III, and the overall synthesis report are to be published sequentially ending in October 2014.

The IPCC, which provides “a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts”, has convened over 800 climate scientists from around the world to produce a landmark report on the state of climate change in the world. We summarise some of the key findings here:

• It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of global warming since the mid-20^th century. Over half of the increase in global surface temperatures between 1951 and 2010 can be attributed to human activities.
• The period from 1983-2012 in the Northern Hemisphere was probably the warmest 30-year period of the last 1,400 years.
• Projections of the highest emissions scenario show an increase in the global average temperature of 4°C by 2100. With significant emissions reductions, the report explains, global temperature increase can be limited to below 2°C but with a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere, we are likely to see an average change in temperature of between 1.5°C and 4.5°C. Warming above 2°C is considered a critical threshold above which we can expect “dangerous” impacts.
• The report warns of the long lasting effects of greenhouse gas emissions, which will remain in the atmosphere and warm the climate for centuries to come even with immediate and significant mitigation activities. Some 15% to 40% of released CO₂ will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years after those emissions have ended.
• Sea levels are expected to rise faster than in the last 40 years. In this century, sea levels are projected to rise between 26cm and 82cm, dependent on greenhouse emissions.
• The Gulf Stream (or Atlantic Ocean circulation) is expected to weaken by 12% to 54% by the end of the century.
• Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been shrinking. The report states that if emissions continue unabated the Arctic Ocean will likely become virtually ice-free in summer before the middle of the century.
• It is “virtually certain” that sea level rise will continue beyond 2100 and sustained warming above some unknown threshold will lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which would cause a global mean sea level rise of up to 7m. The total loss of the Greenland ice sheet is estimated to occur at 1 to 4°C of warming above preindustrial temperature.
• The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) has increased by 40% since pre-industrial times. Average increases in CO₂, methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (NO₂) are believed, with high confidence, to be far higher than increases occurring in the last 22,000 years.
• The recent slowing down of temperature increases, seen in the last 15 years, is not considered a long enough timescale to come to any conclusions.

Although these findings are worrying enough, to achieve this consensus around the physical impacts of climate change, the estimates can be considered conservative.

For many, who have already accepted human-induced climate change, there is a less of a question of what is physically happening and more of a concern over what we are going to do about it. We will have to wait for the next instalments of the IPCC 5^th report and hope that their impact is significant enough to motivate the world to act.