Weekly News Roundup – November 13, 2009

Climate change threatens region’s most traded crops [Daily Monitor, Uganda]

Boreal forests store carbon, need help [Reuters]

Op-ed: Barroso: the anti-hunger imperative [Daily News Egypt]

India: women farmers stand against climate change [Global Voices]

Toward a Climate-Smart Agriculture

Collecting sweet potatoes in Africa. Photo: CIP.

Given what scientists know about climate change and agriculture, it seems pretty obvious that, unless developing country farmers succeed in coping with this threat, they are unlikely to achieve lasting food security in the coming decades. So, confronting the two challenges together, through essentially the same action agenda, would seem to make sense.

That’s the central argument of a new study from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which examines the possibilities for synergy between measures to strengthen food security and efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture. The report sets the stage for its analysis by reminding us that farmers are key protagonists in both of those human dramas.

Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, most of which come from the developing world, form too large a chunk of the global total (14 percent or higher) to be simply ignored. Lowering those emissions is largely a matter of improving the way farmers manage natural resources, like water, soil and plants. Yet, many of these people are too poor and chronically hungry to worry about the implications of their practices in terms of climate mitigation. So, their plight cannot be ignored either, if agricultural emissions are to be significantly reduced.

Strengthening food security among the rural poor depends to a large extent on improving food production. As it turns out, nearly all the options considered in the FAO study for mitigation of agricultural emissions (such as soil and water conservation, low-energy irrigation and agroforestry) are the same as those proposed for achieving sustainable food production. So, the scope for synergy is quite large, though there will be some difficult trade-offs to manage as well.

Bold action on both fronts will require new sources of finance. But current conditions are not encouraging: The main mechanisms for financing climate change mitigation largely exclude agriculture, and not nearly enough is being invested in better food production.

All the more reason for governments at the World Summit on Food Security at Rome in November and the United Nations Climate Change Convention (UNFCC) Conference of the Parties at Copenhagen in December to take seriously the options outlined in the FAO study for supporting actions needed to confront both challenges effectively.

A Fish Story You’ve Got to Believe

There’s not much scope for exaggeration in the story of how climate variation and change undermine the livelihoods of the world’s millions of fisherfolk (most of whom live in the tropics), because the truth is already pretty astonishing.

Small scale fisheries in Bangladesh. Photo: WorldFish.

This is at least part of the message one gleans from a study published recently in Marine Policy, which traces the multiple pressures by which punishing climatic conditions wear away at the assets of fishing communities, leaving them ever more vulnerable to poverty.

Some of the impacts are fairly direct, like the effect of changing water temperatures and more frequent storms on coral bleaching and fish stocks. But others are somewhat insidious, resulting from actions taken outside the fisheries sector altogether. Measures to curb the impacts of flooding on agriculture, for example, may drastically reduce fish production in river basins.

Unlike much previous research, the Marine Policy study (whose authors are from the WorldFish Center and partner institutions in Canada, Germany and the UK) extends the analysis of climate change beyond direct effects on fish stocks – the “natural capital” of fishing communities – to catalogue the damage to their physical, financial, human and social capital as well.

For example, more frequent and severe storms destroy fishing communities’ boats and gear, while disrupting market channels as well as education and other services. Extreme weather also takes lives – killing twice as many women as men at some locations, because traditional roles restrict females largely to the home, where they are more vulnerable.

Tempering the bad news with good, the authors point to a “diverse portfolio” of measures that can strengthen the assets of fisherfolk in the face of climate change. Some of these build on the large “stock of knowledge and experience” that fishing communities have gained from constantly coping with uncertainty. But given the unprecedented pace and degree of the changes now unfolding, the study argues that new approaches are needed as well, such as insurance schemes; forecasting and early warning systems; and more supportive policies and institutions.

Investing in those and other measures, the researchers argue, is a win-win proposition, which will protect critical economic interests (including the US$86 billion worth of fish products traded annually), while reducing the poverty and vulnerability of the people engaged in small-scale fisheries.