REDD

One of the key strategies for curbing greenhouse gas emissions in agricultural landscapes is to protect and enhance the carbon stored in the soil or in trees. Several schemes have developed to reward farmers for good carbon management, where parties may purchase carbon credits produced by farmers to offset their own carbon emissions. However, engaging farmers in such carbon finance schemes is challenging for many reasons, including implementing the various mechanisms for carbon sequestration, dealing with uncertainties surrounding the carbon market, and overcoming information barriers such as language and access to media. This can mean farmers have unclear understanding of risks and develop unrealistic expectations about benefits that carbon schemes can bring. Read more »

Guest Blog by Gabrielle Kissinger, Lexeme Consulting

Representatives from research institutions, NGOs, standards organizations, and food commodity roundtables met in San Diego, California in early September in the workshop The Role of Commodity Roundtables & Avoided Forest Conversion in Subnational REDD+ to discuss how we can increase global commodity production while at the same time sparing our carbon-rich forests and peatlands. The FAO predicts the need for a 70 percent increase in food production by 2050. Some researchers have pointed to the need to simply increase food production yields to meet that need, however others site examples of how increased yields make it more economically feasible for farmers to expand their operations further, to the detriment of forests and their carbon storage. Read more »

As agriculture is increasingly accepted as both a cause of climate change, and as part of the solution, questions arise on how to  actually integrate agriculture into climate change policies. At a recent side event at the UN Climate Conference in Bonn, experts from diverse areas including forestry, economic development, agriculture, climate change and food security, shared strategies for mainstreaming climate-smart agriculture into global and national policies. The common message was resounding: agriculture and deforestation are intimately linked, and integrated action across Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) and agriculture is necessary to achieve mitigation and food security outcomes. Read more »