February 2011

During my past visits to Kenya, Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso, one common streak always came up when talking to farmers about climate adaptation techniques: they were all actively using new seed varieties for their different crops.

I had not really questioned where those seed varieties came from. I saw them in the shops of commercial seed traders, so I asked no more. A bit like a child does not ask where Santa comes from. A long and complex process of seed selection and breeding remained hidden for me.

A visit to ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics near Hyderabad in India, changed all of that. I discovered the world’s headquarter for the agriculture research on five crops: sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut. And I discovered the link between chickpeas, chickpea heroes and the war against hunger.

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The role played by livestock in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions has been covered in much mainstream media, with the UN urging a global move to a meat and dairy free diet. As the world's population increases, and more people become wealthy enough to afford to eat meat and dairy regularly, the impact of livestock on ecosystems is becoming more severe. Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who contributed to the UN study said:

"livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides."

It's not likely that North Americans will go completely vegetarian, or that increasingly wealthy Chinese consumers will stop demanding meat; however, there are smaller scale opportunities for reducing the impact of livestock on the environment, and making it part of the solution to climate change.

Our colleagues at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) point to the opportunities for livestock farmers both to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change, in the recently released WorldWatch "State of the World: Innovations that Nourish the Planet":  Read more »

China launched the decade with its first nationwide pollution census – the result of three years of data collection involving half a million staff. Agriculture, included for the first time in official statistics, was revealed as a major polluter, sending over 13 million tonnes of effluent from fertilizers and pesticides into waterways each year.
 
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, accounting for about a third of global manufacture and use. High application of fertilizers has implications for greenhouse gas emissions as well as water pollution. China’s last GHG census was in 2000.  Since then scientists have been actively trying to improve estimates and evidence to feed public debate and policy-making. A recent example is the journal paper Greenhouse gas emissions from nitrogen fertilizer use in China by Fredrich Kahrl, Yunju Li, Yufang Su, Timm Tennigkeit, Andreas Wilkes and Jianchu Xu.
 
Previous Chinese field studies have shown that farmers could reduce application of nitrogen fertilizers by 20-30% without loss of yield. If scaleable, Kahrl and colleagues estimate that farmers could save 7–10 MtN a year by 2020 by reducing fertilizer intensity, while maintaining harvests. The mitigation potential is impressive: GHG emission reductions of 100-310 MtCO₂e yr^-1, roughly equivalent to the mitigation potential of Indonesia’s entire power sector at the low end, or Africa’s at the high end. Read more »