Africa: Can Agriculture and the Climate Fix Their ‘Unhappy Marriage’ in 2018? – AFCHAM

Rome — After René Castro-Salazar attended the first U.N.-led climate talks in Berlin in 1985 as Costa Rica’s environment and energy minister, he tried to talk about agriculture and climate change – but few wanted to join the conversation.

“There was always opposition – and we couldn’t understand why,” said Castro, now assistant director-general at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

To him, the need to tackle the topic was clear.

Agriculture, forestry and other land uses together account for nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions heating up the planet, according to the FAO.

Cutting these is essential if the world is to keep global temperature rise to a manageable level, said Castro.

Farms and forests can also store large amounts of carbon, and simple actions by all countries could result in immediate environmental benefits, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In the early years, the climate negotiations focused on reducing emissions from the energy sector – the largest emitter – while the relationship between agriculture and climate change was not fully understood.

Later on, poor states feared discussing the linkage would result in obligations for them to curb emissions from farming. Rich nations worried they would have to pay for poor farmers to adapt to a changing climate.

Hunger is on the rise, biodiversity is being lost and poor diets now pose a bigger threat to human health than alcohol and tobacco, said Kjørven, a former senior U.N. official.

Educating consumers will be key to changing that, especially in developed economies where there is high consumption of red meat, responsible for more emissions than other types of food, he said.

“People vote three times a day for a food system they want, in terms of the food they buy. There is enormous power there,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

EAT has commissioned scientists to produce a report next spring about what constitutes a healthy diet in a sustainable food system.

FAO’s Castro said making water usage more efficient – 70 percent of the world’s freshwater goes into agriculture – and rehabilitating 2 billion hectares of degraded land could deliver quick wins.

Livestock, meanwhile, account for nearly two-thirds of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, but combining trees, crops and animals in “silvopastoral” systems can offset some of those emissions and boost the quality of pasture, he added.

In Brazil, a major beef exporter, state agricultural research agency Embrapa is testing this practice, he added.

Another challenge is to boost food production without damaging forests, said IFAD’s Astralaga.

Agriculture is responsible for more than three-quarters of global deforestation, and if the trend continues, about 10 million square km of land will likely be cleared by 2050, she noted.

A 2016 report from the FAO said it would be possible to increase food security while maintaining or increasing forest cover, identifying 22 countries – including Gambia, Chile, Tunisia and Vietnam – that have managed to do so.