Egypt – Gardening at Last

According to Princeton Student Climate Initiative (PSCI), nearly one quarter of climate change is due to our food system. At the same time, conventional agriculture is uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including extreme weather, supply chain disruption, and new pests and diseases. Add to this, the puzzle of how higher temperatures and different weather patterns impact plant health and growth. The following articles explore these issues, starting with a peek at the fight between proponents of high-tech agriculture and agro-ecological or regenerative agriculture.

Image above is from a 2020 article by Audrey Watson on how our food system contributes to climate change and how we can eat more sustainably.

U.S.-led AIM for Climate Project Promotes “False Solutions”

Leading up to last year’s climate talks in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, an international coalition of climate and food sustainability leaders warned against “false solutions” being promoted at the COP27 climate conference by AIM for Climate—”a multi-billion dollar initiative by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to promote agritech (biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, AI) as a primary solution to the climate crisis.”

“Agritech and the industrial agribusiness model it furthers are not a solution to the climate crisis but rather a significant part of the problem,” said Andrew Kimbrell, co-founder of the International Coalition on Climate and Agriculture and executive director of Center for Food Safety. “Farmers around the world are already using innovative ecological farming techniques that sequester carbon, and these proven practices should be scaled up and shared instead of giving millions of dollars to chemical corporations to create false solutions that harm people and nature.”

Formed at COP26 in 2021, AIM for Climate now has more than 200 corporate partnerships, including with Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), BASF, Bayer, The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, CropLife International, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Syngenta, and the World Economic Forum.

“AIM’s attempt to make agritech the center of climate action subverts the growing awareness of agribusiness’ major culpability for the climate crisis, and it must be strongly opposed,” said Debbie Barker, ICCA International Coordinator. “The efforts of AIM and its partners to impose dangerous technologies on the world’s farming communities present an existential threat to what is really needed—transitioning away from industrial agriculture and toward ecological farming.”

In contrast to the corporate-led, tech-driven AIM for Climate project, the ICCA promotes a BROAD approach—Biodiverse, Regenerative, Organic, Appropriate Scale, and Democratic—that incorporates ecological farming including organic, agroecology, biodynamic and other proven sustainable practices that work with nature rather than destroying it.

Michigan State University researchers may have found a link between climate change and plant nutrition. Credit: Hermann Schachner via Wikimedia Commons (plant cells) / Mike Erskine via Unsplash (arid land)

Climate change & plant nutrition

A new study from researchers at Michigan State University underscores that we still have much to learn regarding how plants will function—and how nutritious they will be—as more carbon enters our atmosphere. That same influx of carbon is helping drive climate change, meaning this new work, published in the journal Nature Plants, may be revealing an unexpected way this global phenomenon is reshaping nature and our lives.

“What we’re seeing is that there’s a link between climate change and nutrition,” said Berkley Walker, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Biology whose research team authored the new report. “This is something we didn’t know we’d be looking into when we started.” Although elevated levels of carbon dioxide can be good for photosynthesis, Walker and his lab also showed that increasing CO₂ levels can tinker with other metabolic processes in plants. These lesser-known processes could have implications for other functions like protein production.

It’s too early to say for certain whether plants face a low-protein future, Walker said. But the new research brings up surprising questions about how plants will make and metabolize amino acids—which are protein building blocks—with more carbon dioxide around.

Higher levels of CO₂causing less nutritious crops

For years, scientists have seen enhanced photosynthesis as one of the only possible bright sides of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂)—since plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, it is anticipated that higher levels of the gas will lead to more productive plants. In a review published in Trends in Plant Science, scientists from Institute for Plant Science of Montpellier in France explain why this effect may be less than expected because elevated levels of CO₂ make it difficult for plants to obtain minerals necessary to grow and provide nutritious food.

Maize is one major world crop affected by abiotic stresses including extreme heat and drought exacerbated by climate change. Credit: CABI

Heat and drought significant for food security

Heat and drought are the utmost limiting abiotic factors that pose a major threat to food security and agricultural production, and are exacerbated by “extreme and rapid” climate change, according to a new paper in CABI Reviews. The team of international scientists suggests that it is critical to understand the biochemical, ecological and physiological responses of plants to the stresses of heat and drought in order for more practical solutions and management. They state that plant responses to these challenges may be divided into three categories: phenological, physiological and biochemical.

The scientists, referring to a study examining data from research published between 1980 and 2015, state that drought has reduced wheat and maize yields by up to 40% around the world. They also highlight that projections suggest that for every degree Celsius rise in temperature, this would result in a 6% loss in global wheat yields.

From article by Hannah Ritchie in Our World in Data.

Global food system emissions could stop us reaching climate change targets

To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Fruit and vegetable shelves at an Asda in east London. Photo from article in The Guardian UK. Photograph by Yui Mok/PA.

There has been a flurry of articles out of the UK recently about food rationing, especially of fresh vegetables. Growing up in Scotland in the 1960s, before the EU and before the widespread use of refrigerated trucks, our winter veggies consisted of potatoes, turnips and cabbage – lots and lots of cabbage.

Why UK supermarkets are rationing food

Calls for the government to provide better support to UK food producers have intensified recently as supermarkets have been forced to ration sales of some fresh produce. Weather-related disruption has caused supply shortages of vegetables from places including Spain and North Africa. Former Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King has partly blamed the government’s decision not to subsidise producers’ spiking energy costs this winter under its plan to help businesses affected by the cost of living crisis. The National Farmers’ Union has also called on the government to “back British food production in order to secure a homegrown supply of sustainable food or risk seeing more empty shelves in the nation’s supermarkets”.

Understanding the UK’s complex food supply chains can help explain why this is happening and also provides ideas about how to prevent such shortages in the future. These ideas include:

Diversifying sources of imported food
Increasing support for domestic food production
Improving food supply infrastructure and logistics (Just-in-time food delivery makes us particularly vulnerable to supply chain shocks.)
Preventing food waste

Drought and frost batter vital potato crops in Bolivia

(This article originally appeared in Agence France-Presse)

Dozens of furrows lie barren in a dusty field on the Bolivian highlands. It should be replete with potato plants ready for harvest, but a deadly combination of drought and frost proved too much for the crop. Cristobal Pongo, one of many peasants of the Aymara Indigenous group who devote their lives to potato farming in this region highly susceptible to climate change, looks dejectedly upon the dismal scene. “The potato is our life. We harvest, we sell… It is our livelihood… (it pays) for our children’s education,” the 64-year-old told AFP as he knelt in his field about 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) above sea level. This year, Pongo will have nothing to sell at the market in Calamarca, some 70 kilometers south of the capital La Paz. He does not know what he will do.

Pongo’s crop is not the only one affected by bad weather during the growth season. And the resulting shortage has seen the price of potatoes shoot up sevenfold to almost $2 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) in some markets. Experts say seasonal rains that came too late and untimely frost are likely the outcome of a changing climate. “The highlands, and… the whole region of Bolivia, are vulnerable to (climate) change,” said Luis Blacutt, an atmospheric physics expert at the Higher University of San Andres in La Paz. “These changes are manifesting now. There is a very, very acute rain deficit,” he told AFP.

Pongo now has to wait until the end of October to replant his crop, having given up on having any useful harvest this time around. If no rain has fallen by then, he will have to wait even longer as the soil needs to be moist for potatoes to germinate. But if he waits too long, the winter frosts that come ever earlier could once again destroy the fruits of his labor.

In the face of such uncertainty, Pongo and some neighbors have started using greenhouses erected with the support of a local NGO, Cipca, which comes to the aid of peasant farmers. Greenhouse production is limited to much smaller areas, meaning growers might produce enough for their own use, but not enough to sell.

2023 Climate Change Round-up

It’s hard to stay on top of all the news about climate change and hard to stay optimistic when so much of it seems to be doom and gloom. I take hope from the ongoing work of so many scientists and activists, and from the success of previous international treaties. For example, earlier this month, the UN reported that the Ozone layer may be restored in decades. The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, had countries agree to phase out production and use of ozone-depleting substances. If we could agree globally to save the ozone layer, I think we have a shot at a global agreement to save the entire planet from climate change. Here are a few more reports and news snippets of interest to gardeners.

From the NASA website on global climate change. Photo credits: left – Mellimage/Shutterstock.com, center – Montree Hanlue/Shutterstock.com, right – NASA.

The New Yorker reviews Three Climate Reports: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The good: the Biden Administration released an 83-page “blueprint” for decarbonizing the nation’s transportation systems, which are that country’s largest source of carbon emissions. The bad: the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, estimated that US greenhouse-gas emissions grew by 1.3% in 2022, largely due to an increase in emissions from the transportation sector. This increase, according to the report, “was driven mainly by the demand for jet fuel,” as air travel rebounded from COVID. On the positive side, renewables now produce more electricity than coal in the U.S., and total emissions are still slightly lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2019. However, the US is falling ever further behind on its commitments. Last summer’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorizes some $400B in spending on clean energy, was a “turning point,” and could produce emissions cuts “as early as this year if the government can fast-track implementation.” Still, the group admonished, the U.S. “needs to significantly increase its efforts.” The ugly is the third report, from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which notes that 2022 was the fifth-warmest year on record globally, and last summer in Europe “was the warmest on record by a clear margin.” In fact, , all of the past eight years have been among the eight hottest.

A rainbow above the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. *Photographer: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg*

Bloomberg offers a rosier perspective behind their paywall in an article by Leslie Kaufman and Laura Millan Lombrana called Six Climate Breakthroughs That Made 2022 a Step Toward Net Zero. They begin by acknowledging the almost incomprehensible damage wrought by climate change, and distressing policy decisions, such as rebounds in coal consumption. But they also note the following signs of hope:

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is the country’s most aggressive piece of climate legislation ever. Its provisions ensure that for decades to come billions of dollars will roll toward the energy transition, making it easier to deploy renewable energy, build out green technologies and subsidize consumer adoption of sustainable technologies.
The European Union started to make good on its pledge to cut emissions by introducing additional costs imposed on imported goods from countries without the EU’s restrictions on planet-warming pollution.
Agreement at COP15 helps to protect biodiversity.
The big breakthrough at the 2022 climate negotiations (COP27 in Egypt) sees developed countries agreeing to fund loss, damage and energy transition for developing nations.
Voters in Brazil ousted Bolsonaro and reinstated Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who won the presidency in part by promising to stop deforestation of the Amazon. Pro-climate parties also won big in Australia’s elections.
Following the recognition at COP26 in Glasgow of the dangers of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, 150 countries have pledged to act to reduce methane emissions.

*Prosopis laevigata* mesquite near the Chichimeco dam, in Jesús María, Aguascalientes, Mexico. Photo by Luis Alvaz, from Wikipedia.

Climate Change May Favor Nitrogen-Fixing Plants

In Death Valley National Park, which straddles the California-Nevada border, mesquite plants (genus Prosopis) thrive in extreme aridity. While most vegetation types must extract most of their nutrients from fertile soil, mesquites and similar plants receive additional nitrogen from symbiotic bacteria, which enzymatically fix atmospheric nitrogen into an easily absorbed form in exchange for sugars produced during photosynthesis. To determine how arid conditions affect the biodiversity of these types of nitrogen-fixing plants, University of Florida PhD student Josh Doby compared public data on soil, species counts, and aridity from 47 terrestrial sites in the US. Doby and his colleagues initially hypothesized that nitrogen-deficient soils would prompt an increase in nitrogen-fixing plant diversity. The results, however, showed “that aridity is actually the primary driver” of phylogenetic diversity, Doby says. As conditions became drier, the ratio of nitrogen-fixing to non-fixing plant species increased even as overall plant diversity declined. Because these plants have access to atmospheric nitrogen from their symbiotic bacteria, their leaves contain more nitrogen than other plants, and this buffers them against aridity by helping them retain water, says Mark Adams, an ecologist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia who was not involved in this research. When plants open their stomata to take in carbon dioxide, water escapes, but nitrogen stimulates the production of enzymes that improve the efficiency of carbon uptake, shortening how long plants need to hold their stomata open, Adams explains. “And that’s the secret [of] nitrogen-fixing plants.” Doby’s research is published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography.

A dust storm. Photograph: Jason Davies/Severe Weather Australia

‘It was like an apocalyptic movie’: 20 climate photographs that changed the world: The Guardian UK offers recent images that change how we see our world and how we understand climate change. From the iconic 1968 “Earthrise” photo that is credited with kick-starting the environmental movement to pictures of golfers “playing through” a forest fire in Oregon; a man pushing kids on a satellite dish through floods in Pakistan; and deforestation in the Amazon, these photos bring home the reality of climate change. Note, images of giraffes that died of thirst in Kenya and a starving polar bear are particularly upsetting.

After those sobering images from The Guardian, it’s time for some more positive news. A recent Danish studies found that By leaving garden waste alone, Danes could store 600,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. This is wonderful news for those of us who already practice ecological gardening because there are so many other advantages to leaving garden waste where it lies. For example, fall leaf litter protects a multitude of over-wintering invertebrates. And of course, leaving the yard waste in place is much less work for us gardeners. Talk about a win-win-win!

Rhodo in Rebecca’s back yard. Photo by R. Last.

Climate crisis prompts RHS to plan for sending rhododendrons north

In an example of assisted plant migration, the Guardian reports that the climate crisis has prompted the Royal Horticultural Society to plan a move of its important collection of rhododendrons from its flagship Wisley garden in Surrey to Harlow Carr in North Yorkshire.

Visual abstract. Effect of climate change–impact menu labels on fast food ordering choices. Credit: JAMA Network Open (2022). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.48320

In the category of things we can do, pushing for climate labelling just might be a good avenue to explore. A recent Study shows climate impact labels on food sold in fast food restaurants can change buying habits. A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. has found that placing labels on foods sold at fast food restaurants informing consumers of the negative impact of the production of such foods on the planet can alter consumer buying habits. In their paper published on JAMA Network Open, the group describes conducting an online survey using a fictional restaurant to learn more about consumer food buying choices.

From The Guardian, a wind farm in Texas. Photograph: Delcia Lopez/AP

Finally, in a lengthy piece in The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit writes that “Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis.” Her article about how to tell the story of climate change (‘If you win the popular imagination, you change the game’: why we need new stories on climate) offers hope for new story-telling and useful tips on how to talk about climate change with your friends.