21 February 2016, Climate News Network, Fall in rain hits Southeast Asia food yields. Changing climate and weather are creating severe problems for some of the world’s largest producers of rice and other major agricultural crops.The boat moves sluggishly up the Ayeyarwaddy, the river formerly known as the Irrawaddy. Every so often it comes to a halt as the ferryman dips a bamboo pole in the shallow waters, checking for sandbanks. Even though it is the dry season, water levels in the Ayeyarwaddy – Myanmar’s main river, and one of Southeast Asia’s principal waterways – are unusually low. The ferry is carrying passengers and goods from the ancient temple site of Baganto the city of Mandalay. “The journey is taking longer and longer as the water level keeps dropping,” says the skipper of the creaking, wooden-hulled boat. “It has been so dry. For the last two years, the monsoon in this area has arrived late and the rains were not enough. Then, when it did rain, it was intense, and more and more sand and earth was washed downriver because the trees are being cut down further north. It makes the journey very difficult.” Damaged crops A similar story is being heard across much of the region – from the Brahmaputrain Assam in India, west of Myanmar, to the Mekong in Vietnam in the east. Unusual weather patterns and a lack of rain in many areas in recent years have caused drought and severely damaged crops in what are some of the world’s most fertile areas. When the rains do arrive the dry, caked earth often cannot absorb the water. Read More here
Tag Archives: Agriculture
28 January 2016, Science Daily, Intact nature offers best defense against climate change. Worldwide responses to climate change could leave people worse off in the future according to a recent study conducted by CSIRO, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the University of Queensland. The paper, “Intact ecosystems provide the best defense against climate change,” published in Nature Climate Change, discusses how certain adaptation strategies may have a negative impact on nature which in turn will impact people in the long-term. “In response to climate change, many local communities around the world are rapidly adjusting their livelihood practices to cope with climate change, sometimes with catastrophic implications for nature,” according to CSIRO’s principal research scientist Dr. Tara Martin. The authors say that in Australia and Canada, conservation reserves are being used as drought relief to feed livestock, while forests in the Congo Basin in Africa are being cleared for agriculture in response to drought, and coral reefs are being destroyed to build sea walls from the low-lying islands in Melanesia. Dr. Martin added: “These are just few of the human responses to climate change that, if left unchallenged, may leave us worse off in the future due to their impacts on nature. Functioning and intact, forests, grasslands, wetlands and coral reefs represent our greatest protection against floods and storms.” The paper states that intact native forests have been shown to reduce the frequency and severity of floods, while coral reefs can reduce wave energy by an average of 97 per cent, providing a more cost-effective defense from storm surges than engineered structures. Read More here
17 December 2015, GRIST, No, lettuce is not worse for the climate than bacon. Is bacon back? The recent news that your favorite breakfast meat can cause cancer sent self-righteous vegans cackling, but they were shushed this week after the publication of a study alleging that meat actually has a lower carbon footprint than vegetables. At least, that’s what you might think if you’d read this article fromScientific American or this one from The Telegraph or this one from The Christian Science Monitor or a multitude of others proclaiming that bacon is better for the climate than salads. Carnegie Mellon University News reports: According to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie. Published in Environment Systems and Decisions, the study measured the changes in energy use, blue water footprint and GHG emissions associated with U.S. food consumption patterns. “Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. “Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken.” So romaine is worse for the planet than pork belly? Really? Does this mean we can all take the lettuce out of our BLTs, add another layer of bacon, and feel just great about it? Actually, no. Researchers compared the foods calorie-for-calorie, which can be misleading. “It is absurd to compare the environmental impacts between bacon and lettuce when you’re using calories as the denominator,” Brent Kim of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future’s Food Production and Public Health Program told ThinkProgress. “A serving of lettuce has fewer calories than a stick of gum.” In other words, you’d have to eat a huge number of salads to equal the same number of calories you get from a few pieces of bacon. Just how many salads? We made this handy chart to illustrate. Read more here
17 December 2015, Stockholm Reslilience Centre, Social-ecological traps – Damned if they do, damned if they don’t – Adaptation to environmental change is not straightforward, struggling fishing communities in Vietnam show why. Responding to climate change is good but not all responses are great. The term “adaptation”, understood as adjustments in behaviour to either mitigate harm or exploit opportunities emerging from climate change, features prominently in scientific analyses and policy papers. But it comes with a variety of challenges. One important one is the assumption that adaptation by default leads to something better. The reality can be much different. Keep doing what they have always done In a study published in Environment, Development and Sustainability, centre researcher Wijnand Boonstra together with Tong Thi Hai Hanh from Uppsala University have looked at how fishing communities in the Tam Giang Lagoon in central Vietnam have dealt with a variety of challenges. Climate change, floods, population growth and urbanization are some of them. Boonstra and Hanh focused on two villages in the Quang Phuoc commune, Phuoc Lap and Mai Duong. The first village depends significantly on fishing and low-input aquaculture and the second on rice production and aquaculture. Common for both villages is the exposure to ever more frequent storms and floods. Through a mixed-method approach consisting of questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and focus groups, Boonstra and Hanh found that despite attempts at diversifying their fishing methods, the end result is that they keep doing what they have always done. This in turn leads to declining fish stocks and frequent harvest failures in aquaculture. Read More here