The three-day event, Annual Forum of the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA), showcased innovative ways in which farmers around the world are adapting their practices to become more and more climate smart.
The forum held in Rome witnessed participation from a number of stakeholders—governments, farmer organisations, private sector institutes, civil society and the academia, who discussed challenges facing the agriculture sector today and shared solutions on how to overcome them.
Maria Helena Semedo, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) deputy director general and coordinator for natural resources, said during the launch of GACSA, “Agriculture will play a crucial role in addressing the planet’s future challenge and is key to providing important adaptation, mitigation synergies to climate change as well as socio-economic and environmental co-benefits.”
Evil of climate change
Climate change—the increased frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and storms— is the most challenging issue of our age.
A book detailing how climate change affects food systems says that severity of floods and storms over the past 30 years has put the agriculture sectors of many developing countries at the risk of growing food insecurity.
Around 570 millions farms across the world are facing the threat of climate change at present.
David Nabarro, the special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Climate Change, said world leaders want a change in “modes of production and consumption”… so that the “needs of future generations are fulfilled”.
Stepping up and facing the many challenges in agriculture in not easy. However, the solution may lie in climate-smart agriculture (CSA) that broadly works on three parameters.
These are sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and farmers’ incomes, adapting to Climate Change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), wherever possible.
Ugandan farmer Rose Akaki said, “When you begin to suffer you are seeing things going from bad to worse. You are bound to adapt.”
Adaptation is the key when it comes to CSA. We need to transit to a more sustainable food system and mitigate climate change while at the same time adapt to climate change. Communities that are highly food-insecure or particularly vulnerable to climate change will necessarily prioritise adaptation, but many of the changes they might make to enhance resilience will also increase productivity and efficiency of inputs (fertilizer and water use), and even have co-benefits for mitigation.
Practices such as inter-cropping, multiple cropping and crop rotation are some of the practices farmers are using to fight climate change.
Reducing emissions
According to a report by FAO, to achieve food security and agricultural development goals by 2030, adapting to climate change and lowering emissions will be necessary.
Around 41 per cent of GHG come from agriculture, the CGIAR says.
There are a number of practices that can reduce emissions from agriculture. One is alternate wetting and drying of paddy.By reducing the frequency of irrigation (letting the fields drain periodically), methane emissions from flooded rice production can be cut in half.
The practice was originally developed as a way to save water; so it has potential to be adaptive to climate change as well.
Another method that can work is increasing the productivity of milk and meat production. The livestock sector contributes to about 14.5 per cent of human-induced GHG, much of which is methane produced by ruminant digestion.
Increasing animal and herd productivity means that fewer animals are required to produce the same amount of milk or meat, which also reduces the emissions generated in producing that food.
According to food policy specialist Devinder Sharma when we look at climate change, the issue of GHG is important. “Globally rice is targeted for (the) wrong reasons. More emissions come from livestock production,” he said.
Sharma blamed the intensive farming system for being the culprit as it involves mechanisation and use of fertilisers. The expert advocated a change in economic policies to stop plundering of natural resources, prevent water contamination and land degradation.
Which is better?
When it comes to a comparison between climate-smart agriculture and organic farming, the former is defined by its desired outcomes—agricultural systems that are resilient, productive, and have low emissions.
Organic agriculture is defined by the method of production (no use of synthetic pesticides or fertilisers). However, many of the practices used in organic agriculture are climate smart.
Organic agriculture enhances natural nutrient cycling and builds soil organic matter, which can also support resilience to climate change and sequester carbon in soils.
The forum concluded that climate-smart agriculture can be more effective and successful. A question was asked on what linkages were being established with people working in the sustainable diets sector to which the answer was that sustainable diets and nutrition were important issues and these should be linked to agriculture.
Emphasis was also laid on introducing nutrition indicators, by going beyond calories and promoting “from field to fork approach”.
Case study – The right solution for Africa
One of the main features of climate-smart agriculture is that it considers adaptation and mitigation together in the context of building agricultural systems for food security Credit: Africa Renewal/FlickrThe most vulnerable are subsistence farmers who are prone to climate shocks. Extreme weather events are recurring and persistent. They are not isolated events. There is a need to introduce climate-smart agriculture and water conservation system to make local communities resistant to droughts and floods.
Smart solution
Climate-smart agriculture can be a solution for Africa as the continent will witness frequent drought and alteration in precipitation patterns in years to come.
Africa’s population is predicted to double from its current 0.9 billion by 2050. According to the FAO, more than a quarter of sub-Saharan-Africa people are undernourished. Crop production will need to increase by 260 per cent by 2050 to feed the continent’s growing population.
Better land management practice is one of the ways to fight climate change and increase resilience of farming systems in the continent.
Improved land management strategies used across sub-Saharan Africa are helping protect the environment, boost productivity, strengthen livelihood and enhance food security.
Desertification in Africa
In Africa, threats of desertification and land degradation are ever present, especially in Sahel and the southern edge of the Sahara.
According to the CGIAR report in Niger, farmers have participated in natural regeneration for the past 30 years to restore lands. Local farmers have helped made green 5 million hectares by protecting and managing the natural regeneration of trees and bushes.
In Ethiopia, a project revived 2,700 hectares of degraded forests with a diversity of indigenous species. Rather than replanting trees with costly nursery stock, the farmers managed natural regeneration and more than 90 per cent of the project area has been reforested from stumps of trees previously felled.
A document, published by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and its TerraAfrica partners, including FAO, takes stock of lessons learnt during the five-year TerrAfrica Strategic Investment Program for sustainable land management.
TerrAfrica is an Africa-driven partnership programme to boost sustainable land and water management techniques across sub-Saharan Africa.
One of the main features of climate-smart agriculture is that it considers adaptation and mitigation together in the context of building agricultural systems for food security.
Boosting food security
Climate-smart agriculture explicitly looks for where there are synergies and trade-offs among food security, adaptation and mitigation. The significance of it in the African context stems from the fact that the continent is predominantly rural with many small-holder farmers, Branca added.
Climate-smart agriculture can help African farmers adapt to and mitigate climate change. Several agricultural practices contribute to both these goals simultaneously.
When farmers plant trees to prevent land degradation, they also contribute to climate change mitigation by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
There are projects that have a primary objective of reducing emissions by preventing deforestation and forest degradation. However, these can provide benefits to local communities as well.
As Africa is drought prone, farmers need crop varieties and agricultural practices that continue to produce under extreme weather conditions.
Efforts are on to breed new varieties of crops that are more resilient to erratic weather, especially to drought. Many farmers across Africa are using improved drought-tolerant and insect-resistant crop varieties that help them to improve productivity.
Interview – ‘Climate-smart agriculture not an option, it is a necessity’
When it comes to a comparison between climate-smart agriculture and organic farming, the former is defined by its desired outcomes—agricultural systems that are resilient, productive, and have low emissionsSonali Bisht, founder and advisor to the Institute of Himalayan Environmental Research and Education, an institute dedicated to sustainable development in the Himalayas, talks about how climate-smart agriculture can conserve soil health and make judicious use of water resources.
What are the best ways to reduce greenhouse gases emissions associated with agriculture?
The best ways to reduce them is to produce and consume (food) locally as much as possible (and) cut down on distances involved in travelling.
Ecological and organic agriculture use on-farm and natural inputs and do not use chemicals produced in factories. Reusing of agricultural wastes rather than incineration also reduces greenhouse gases. We also have technology to use livestock emissions in productive ways.
How different is the concept of climate-smart agriculture when compared to organic farming? Do you think organic farming shows us the path towards a more sustainable future?
Agro ecology, conservation of agricultural diversity, organic farming using on-farm inputs, appropriate crop management to manage and sustain soil health and (ensuring the) health, safety and nutrition of food are the paths to a sustainable future.
Do you think a global transition to a more resilient and sustainable agriculture that draws more on natural biological and ecosystem processes will help us achieve zero hunger by 2030?
I certainly think so, provided (that) agriculture research institutions focus on research in this direction and national governments as well as international institutions commit themselves to it and create an enabling environment for farmers as well as other stakeholders (involved in) agriculture.
How does the concept of climate-smart agriculture deal with the following problems: degradation of farmlands, increasing competition for land and water, stagnation in growth of cereal yields and impacts of higher temperatures, droughts and flooding?
Climate-smart agriculture would ideally invest in and promote innovative, adaptive farming communities working towards restoring and conserving soil health.
(It will also) use land and water optimally, do seed selection (judicially) and adapt to uncertain weather conditions armed with the knowledge of options, choices and resources to use them.
Courtsey: FAO
In the present context f climate change, should we focus on producing more with less or should adaptation be the keyword?
They are not mutually exclusive and agriculture is very site specific, so there cannot be universal solutions.
Do you think climate-smart agriculture can prevent Africa’s food shortage and deal with Asia’s growing population pressure?
Climate-smart agriculture is not an option. It is a necessity for now. The first pillar of climate-smart agriculture is productivity. Farmers need productivity, along with adaptation and mitigation efforts.
India has witnessed one of its worst droughts this year. How will climate-smart agriculture help the country in managing its water resources better?
Climate-smart agriculture should create readiness to deal with extreme weather conditions and weather uncertainties, which are becoming the new normal. Management of water resources cannot be left to governments. Every citizen and every farmer has a responsibility.
Every climate-smart farmer would incorporate practices like farm ponds, bundings, trenching, mulching and other practices for conservation of soil moisture, use appropriate seeds and on-farm inputs (to avoid debt situations) and to have better access and control over required water resources.
In what ways can climate-smart agriculture be used in mountain regions to ensure crop production? The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has reported that approximately 78 per cent of the world’s mountain area is not suitable, or is marginally suitable, for growing crops.
Mountain communities have lived in and farmed small parcels of land, terracing them and using them for their food and nutrition security.
They have grown crops, raised livestock, fished and utilised forests sustainably. Research and resource support building on their own traditional knowledge and experience as well as natural advantages would enable them to do this even better for themselves and the larger community. Moreover, mountain regions have been repositories of agro biodiversity as well as knowledge of risk resilience, both of which are interlinked.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.