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September, 2008
Source:
CGIAR
No one understands better than
farmers do how the weather, especially when it takes a turn for
the worse, can affect people and their land. That’s why farmers
around the world have always talked and worried about the
weather obsessively. But now, emerging weather patterns have a
lot of other people worried, too, and their concerns are well
founded.
According to a report of the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
released in February 2006, the average temperature of the
earth’s surface, having already risen by 0.74 degrees
Centrigrade in the last 100 years, is expected to increase by an
average of about 3 degrees over the next century, assuming
greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates. Even
the minimum predicted temperature increase, 1.4 degrees, will
represent a profound change, unprecedented in the last 10,000
years.
The scientific evidence behind
these projections, says Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the
UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is
unequivocal, leaving “no doubt as to the dangers mankind is
facing.”
Heavy Weather
One of those perils consists of
rising sea levels, caused by the expansion of ocean volumes and
by the melting of glaciers and ice caps. Coastal areas around
the world, including major urban areas, could be inundated, as
depicted in Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary, An
Inconvenient Truth.
An even greater sea of
troubles, though, is the one encroaching specifically on
agriculture. Worldwide, farming is a significant source of
greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for a sizable share of the
estimated 20 percent of total emissions that result from land
use. But in developing countries, the more immediate problem,
insist IPCC members Martin Parry and Cynthia Rosenzweig, is
agriculture’s vulnerability to climate change and the grave
consequences this implies for the world’s poor and hungry.
Part of the danger they face
comes from what are called “extreme weather events.” Using
computer-based simulation models, scientists predict these will
occur with greater frequency, especially in the tropics. In
addition, fundamental changes in rainfall patterns, together
with rising temperatures, will shorten growing seasons, reducing
crop productivity. These trends are already in evidence.
Drought, severe storms and
flooding are hardly news for farmers in the developing world.
They have been contending with such catastrophes since the
beginnings of agriculture 10,000 years ago. But never before
have so many rural people been so vulnerable.
About 63 percent of the
developing world’s total population lives in rural areas,
according to World Bank estimates, and they include nearly 75
percent of the approximately 1.2 billion people who are trapped
in extreme poverty.
Poverty, because it limits
options, is a major reason for the vulnerability of developing
country farmers to global climate change. Another is the steady
degradation during recent decades of the soil, water, forests
and other plant resources on which their livelihoods depend.
This has resulted in large part from the intensification and
expansion of agriculture in response to growing demand for food,
feed and fiber from earth’s rapidly growing human population.
Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s
poorest region and the one most dependent on agriculture, brings
the problem into sharp focus. An estimated 500 million hectares
of its agricultural land are already degraded, say soil
scientists. Moreover, 95 percent of the region’s cropland is
rainfed, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), and rainfall patterns are already quite erratic.
With more “heavy weather” on
the horizon, how will farmers in Africa and elsewhere keep pace
with the demand for food, which is expected to at least double
in the developing world over the next 40 years? And what hope do
they have of creating better livelihoods for themselves and
their children?
Focused on Climate
Change
The consequences of global
climate change, like the immediate prospect of being hanged, to
paraphrase literary figure Samuel Johnson, are wonderfully
concentrating the minds of agricultural scientists, development
professionals and policy makers around the world. Among them are
the approximately 1,000 scientists and 7,000 other staff of the
15 centers supported by the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research, or CGIAR.
The CGIAR Centers and their
numerous partners in government and civil society organizations
have been helping farmers cope with the effects of variable and
severe weather for nearly three decades. Specifically, they seek
ways to protect water and other natural resources under extreme
weather conditions and other pressures, to develop crop
varieties that are adapted to harsh climates, and to identify
policy and institutional innovations that better enable
countries and communities to cope with these conditions. Through
this work, CGIAR researchers have generated a wealth of improved
crop germplasm, knowledge, technologies, methods and policy
analysis, which can lessen the vulnerability of marginalized
rural people and places through more sustainable management of
crops, livestock, soils, water, forests, fisheries and
biodiversity.
This research is highly
relevant to the economic and environmental constraints that
developing country farmers face today. And it will become even
more necessary as global climate change magnifies those
constraints.
Let’s Be Civilized
Because so many of the rural
poor in developing countries depend on agriculture, it is one of
the central arenas in which the threat posed by climate change
must be confronted. The efforts of CGIAR scientists provide part
of the basis for action, but they must be more sharply focused
and better coordinated. Toward this end, the CGIAR announced its
intention, at its 2006 annual general meeting to intensify and
streamline this research in collaboration with a wide array of
research and development partners.
Much depends on the success of
this initiative. Agriculture, after all, still forms the basis
of “civilization,” a concept that has less to do with material
and cultural progress, according to world-renowned historian
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, than with how people shape and adapt
to diverse environments in meeting their food and other needs.
Global climate change poses an
unprecedented challenge to humanity’s skill at maintaining
viable livelihoods under highly diverse and variable climatic
and environmental conditions. We might even think of it as the
ultimate test of just how civilized we can be. |
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