CGIAR participation in the United Nations Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen (COP15) came to a close last Monday, culminating in a well-attended side event, which brought together a wide cross section of representatives from the agricultural and forestry communities. Immediately afterwards, the organizers issued a joint statement, which conveys a clear message about the urgent need to address food security, rural poverty and the threat of climate change through an integrated approach that embraces both the forestry and agricultural sectors. 

We included that statement in a previous blog post and also blogged extensively in Rural Climate Exchange about three separate but closely related COP15 events – a side event on Climate Change and Food Security as well as Agriculture and Rural Development Day and Forest Day 3 – which prepared the way for the joint statement 

It remains to be seen whether or how climate negotiators and governments will respond in the coming days, weeks and months to the call for serious commitment to climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture and forestry. In any case, the CGIAR and its partners will forge ahead with research that better enables developing countries to cope with climate change, and they will continue pressing the case that farms and forests are an important part of the solution. 

As for the Rural Climate Exchange blog, it has essentially fulfilled its original purpose of supporting CGIAR and partner scientists in the run up to COP15, as they worked to secure a significant place for agriculture, together with forests, in any new climate agreement. Even so, over the next few days, we will continue to publish posts conveying useful information from discussions and presentations at COP15. 

After a short holiday, we’ll consult with colleagues about next steps with Rural Climate Exchange and then let you know what to expect in 2010. 

If you have suggestions about the future of Rural Climate Exchange, please leave a comment.

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A wide cross section of farmers, researchers and development experts spoke with one voice today at a side event held in conjunction with the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, calling on negotiators to address food security, rural poverty and the threat of climate change through an integrated approach that embraces both the forestry and agricultural communities.

After the event, representatives of the two communities issued a joint statement, which reflects the outcomes of three separate but closely related events held over the last several days: including a COP15 side event on Climate Change and Food Security, together with Agriculture and Rural Development Day and Forest Day 3.

Following is the joint statement:

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering carbon in agriculture and forests must be an essential component of any strategy to keep global warming below the 2 degree Celsius threshold. Climate adaptation and mitigation measures must have multiple sustainable development benefits, including conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

The communities:

• Agree that it is critical for food security to be integrated into the shared vision of the Long-Term Cooperative Action text in order to open the door for adaptation and mitigation support.
• Urge climate negotiators to agree on the early establishment of an agricultural work program under the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA).
• Look for agreement that REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) include agriculture, forestry and other land uses.
• Believe that the LULUCF (land use, land-use change and forestry) accounting system needs to be favorable to agriculture.

The agricultural community is committed to playing an active role in reducing emissions, while increasing the productivity and sustainability of agriculture. We recognize that agriculture must nearly double food production to meet the demands of a growing population expected to reach 9 billion by mid-century while minimizing the sector’s emissions.

The forestry community is committed to helping design and implement new mechanisms to mobilize forests for climate mitigation and adaptation, while exploiting synergies with sustainable development objectives and managing associated risks. We recognize the significance of forest-based emissions and the cost-effectiveness of early action to reduce them. The most important drivers of deforestation originate from outside the forestry sector, including agriculture. There are also significant opportunities to correct current market and governance failures that lead to perverse outcomes for climate change and food security. Forest- and agriculture-based adaptation strategies are available but are not yet fully appreciated by policymakers and the general public.

Significant financial resources and political will are needed to better address food security, slow deforestation and forest degradation, and reach emission reduction targets. Investments must be transparent and additional to support for global food security and rural development. These resources must be accessible to all stakeholders, including researchers, civil society and especially forest communities, farmers and their associations. Resources must also be devoted to the research necessary to underpin needed advances in the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of agriculture- and forestry-based approaches to mitigation and adaptation.

Policy processes need to be empowering and adaptive to respond to realities on the ground as well as the desires and aspirations of local communities and to ensure good governance. In particular, the role of local institutions in sustainable natural resource management should be given increased recognition, and the rights and roles of indigenous and local and farming communities, especially women and young farmers, must be recognized in developing national mitigation and adaptation strategies.

We commit to strengthening cross-sectoral cooperation to address the drivers of deforestation, enhance sustainable agricultural growth and foster rural development. We recognize that addressing climate change is fundamental to food security and poverty reduction today and for future generations.

Climate change has made it unmistakably clear that the consequences of deforestation are a truly global problem. That’s why halting deforestation to help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions must be a shared global responsibility. Exactly how the responsibilities must be shared was the subject of an afternoon plenary session at Forest Day 3, taking place in conjunction with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. 

Sir Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics, who authored the influential Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, examined the question from an economic perspective, emphasizing the relatively low cost of reducing deforestation in comparison with the huge benefits that would result from determined global action. 

Responsibility for designing appropriate policies must reside with the “countries where the trees stand,” Stern said, because they have the best understanding of the conditions required for success. Yet, responsibility for paying the costs of deforestation must be shared globally, and this effort must be part of a larger development strategy that reduces rural poverty. Stern went on to discuss options for financing efforts to halt deforestation, calling on governments to come up with serious financial packages that include new sources of public funds, including debt instruments. 

Hilary Benn, the UK’s Minister for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, reinforced this message about shared responsibilities, citing important examples of commitment and leadership, such as Wangari Maathai’s establishment of the Green Belt Movement, which earned her the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize; UK prime minister Gordon Brown’s recent “game-changing” proposal on “fast-start financing;” and the bold efforts of Eduardo Braga, president of Brazil’s Amazonas State, to drastically reduce deforestation. 

Benn urged governments and climate negotiators to turn the consensus on forests and climate change into a final climate agreement, which he said is the most important thing that can be done now to preserve our natural world. Citing Charles Darwin’s observation that surviving species are not necessarily the strongest or most intelligent but those able to adapt, Benn stressed that the time is now to secure the future of our children and grandchildren.

The opening plenary session of Forest Day 3 (FD3), a side event held today in conjunction with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, left no room for doubt about the important role of this event in rapidly evolving global efforts to mitigate climate change through the reduction of deforestation and forest degradation, commonly known as REDD. This was evident both from the content of the session and from the eminence of the speakers delivering the key messages. 

At the first forest day held 2 years ago, the link between forests and a new global climate agreement was still merely a prospect, as pointed out by Francis Seymour, director general of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), in her welcome remarks. By FD2, the key question had become how forestry would be included in the negotiations. But participants at FD3 were already looking beyond Copenhagen to the “challenges that countries and communities will face, as they begin to implement mitigation and adaptation strategies related to forests.” 

While acknowledging the potential of REDD and the progress that has been made, all of the speakers sounded a note of caution about what could go wrong. In video-recorded remarks, former US president Bill Clinton urged that measures be taken to avoid undermining the livelihoods of the rural people who depend on forests for a livelihood. 

Likewise, the first keynote speaker, Elinor Ostrum, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, warned against “simple formulas that may sound good but don’t have the desired result.” Such has been the case, for example, with the classical top-down approach of establishing government protected forest areas. Far more effective, Ostrum stressed, are adaptive approaches, which gain the trust of forest communities, respect their rights and involve them closely in forest monitoring, a practice that is positively associated with maintenance of forest density. 

Focusing more on the policy arena, Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, together with former US vice president Al Gore, observed that in recent decades forestry professionals have “yielded too much space to others.” He urged them to “think hard about how to correct this institutional imperfection,” as a prerequisite for better enabling forestry to serve as a “huge provider of goods and services,” including that of climate change mitigation. 

Echoing Ostrum, he also warned against unworkable top-down approaches, calling for a bottom-up forestry movement, or “religion.” He further highlighted the need for wider and more effective use of scientific knowledge as a means of creating the conditions by which the political will needed for climate change adaptation and mitigation in forests can “bubble up to the top.” 

Also acknowledging considerable risks, Gro Harlem Brundtland, chair of the commission whose 1987 report, Our Common Future, coined the term “sustainable development,” spelled out the “overarching commitments” and key steps needed to get REDD off the ground. Industrialized countries, for example, must provide compensation for reduce deforestation, while developing countries must carry this out in a transparent and sustainable manner, respecting the rights of forest communities. 

Conveying a message of urgency and optimism, Brundtland stressed the importance of learning quickly how to implement the new and ambitious concept of REDD, a role that CIFOR and others must fulfill with true excellence. She called also called on government leaders to make the right decisions and avoid the embarrassment of leaving Copenhagen, like the incompetent emperor of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, with no clothes on.

CREDIT: IITA (International Institute for Tropical Agriculture)

Seeds for Needs is the concept behind Bioversity International’s proposal to the Ideas Marketplace, which will be part of the Agriculture and Rural Development Day in Copenhagen on 12 December. “We want to use informatics to select crop varieties adapted to future climates,” explains Laura Snook of Bioversity.

The idea takes as its starting point predictions that climate change will severely impact food production and that farmers in many places will need new varieties, and even new crops, to adapt their farming systems. Bioversity and other CGIAR Centers already hold more than 650,000 accessions of plant diversity from around the world in trust for the global community. How to find the ones that might meet farmers’ future needs?

Location coordinates – latitude and longitude – for where the accessions were collected are a reasonable proxy for the growing conditions that suit those accessions. Plugging that information into geographical information systems can help to identify accessions pre-adapted to future growing conditions elsewhere in the world.

The selected varieties still need to be tested, and this is where Seeds for Needs has already scored. A proposal to work with women farmers in Ethiopia was named a winner in the World Bank’s recent Development Marketplace 2009. Ehsan Dulloo, the Bioversity scientist who is leading the partnership with the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation in Addis Ababa, says that in Ethiopia women are the seed custodians.

“They have to confront significant uncertainty in the climate every year, and regularly face food shortages as crops fail.” Locally available varieties may no longer be sufficient, and so, Dulloo says, “communities need to look further than their neighbors’ fields for the best-adapted seeds.”

Pre-selected varieties “will provide women farmers with adapted varieties to help them cope with climate change,” Dulloo notes. The project will work with around 200 vulnerable women farmers at two target sites and will develop a unique framework that combines available knowledge of crop diversity from a range of sources and an improved understanding of climate-change scenarios in Ethiopia with farmers’ own experiences, indigenous knowledge and adaptation strategies.

Dr. Henry Neufeldt, head of climate change research at the World Agroforestry Centre

The global extent of trees on farms is surprising: 46% of agricultural land globally has at least 10% tree cover. The potential for these areas to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation has been mostly overlooked in the UNFCCC discussions. Dr. Henry Neufeldt, head of climate change research at the World Agroforestry Centre, made the case for trees on farms to store carbon, help farmers deal with a changing climate, and enhance food security. More trees on farms can help control soil erosion, work as windbreaks, and increase the amount of water filtering into the soil. Agroforestry systems also help provide fruits, fodder, fuelwood and medicine, which benefit farmers more directly than, say, carbon markets. However, these benefits only come with time.  Carbon payments would provide upfront funding that would give farmers an incentive to change their land use practices.  And put extra money in their pockets.

One particular agroforestry species, mentioned by ICRAF director general Dennis Garrity, is Faidherbia albida, an indigenous acacia species that helps fertilize the soil and does not compete with other crops for water or nutrients. Faidherbia, and species like it, could help bring important benefits to small farmers, but it needs more attention and research on how to scale up its benefits. A global climate change deal that recognizes the importance of trees outside forests could help create incentives for agroforestry adoption across the tropics, reducing pressure on natural forests, and creating sustainable benefits to small farmers through carbon payments and improved climate resilience.

Read more.

World Food Prize winner and Father of India’s Green Revolution Prof. M.S. Swaminathan speaks at ARDD

Agricultural landscapes can help mitigate climate change and help farmers adapt to its impacts, but research from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) shows that farmers will only adopt new practices if they are profitable. IFPRI’s Claudia Ringler presented evidence from East Africa, a region where the economy is closely tied to cycles of drought, where researchers are trying to identify the agricultural practices that have adaptation and mitigation benefits, and also bring good income to farmers. Farmers surveyed are often aware of the impacts of climate change and can suggest ways they could adapt their farming practices to deal with these impacts. Some of these activities include planting trees, irrigation, switching to new varieties or commodities and using fertilizer. However, there are many barriers to adopting these methods, including poor access to credit, shortage of land, and shortage of labour to implement alternative farming practises. The project will assess the profitability of those alternatives in order to assess the opportunities for agriculture as a solution to climate change.

During the discussion, a participant noted that that integrated production systems that combine two or more crops or commodities could also help improve resilience. She gave the example of irrigated rice and fish farming in southeast Asia as a system that diversifies production and enhances income, while reducing the impacts of one crop failing. Claudia mentioned that these types of systems often become expensive due to costs of labour. One possible solution would be agroforestry, as farmers want to plant trees, but don’t know which variety to plant, or can’t afford seedlings. In order for agriculture to really become part of the climate change solution, national governments need to take notice of its potential and support the agricultural sector by improving access to finance to help start up climate change initiatives. Agriculture in developing countries also needs to be recognized within an international framework for climate change.

Learn more about IFPRI’s climate change research.

Photo: Jeff Haskins