PROTECTING FORESTS

THE UNITED NATION’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change annual report, stresses the need to quickly and drastically change how the world manages land.

Between extreme weather conditions like droughts and floods, an increasing demand for bio-fuels, and a growing population, a warming world brings the possibility of major food crises.

Increasingly, securing enough food to feed a global population that’s expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050 has become a concern for policymakers. But scientists are now warning that if we continue cutting down forests with abandon to increase food production, climate change will invariably worsen.

Around the world, extreme weather events are severely altering the landscape by eroding coastlines, melting permafrost, and turning once-fruitful soils to dust.

An estimated 23 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, it says, are caused by agriculture, food production like raising cattle, and deforestation. Half of the world’s human-made methane—a dangerous greenhouse gas—comes from producing rice and raising cattle.

SMART AGRICULTURE

Techniques like regenerative agriculture as a sustainable farming option. The term describes a holistic approach to growing crops that incorporates integrating tree cover, using cover crops, rotating agriculture, and relying on composting to naturally improve farmland topsoil.

Precision farming is another example of a sustainable farming practice that uses satellite imagery to pinpoint the exact amount of fertilizer and water a crop needs, rather than blanketing a field in water or chemicals.

KEY POINTS

§  Notably, this IPCC report is the first to recommend bolstering Indigenous land ownership rights as a climate change mitigation strategy.

§  For the first time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report recognizes that securing our rights is a critical solution to the climate crisis.

§  Indigenous communities, particularly those in the Amazon, have long struggled to be granted land titles for their homes. The lack of titles creates legal grounds for companies interested in using their land’s resources to claim the land as their own.

§  By strengthening Indigenous rights, the report says forests can be better managed for carbon storage.

§  Indigenous people prevent mining and timber industries from taking root on their lands, and their localized agricultural methods are often more sustainable than those practiced by large companies.

§  Reducing car emissions and transitioning to renewable energy sources both help slow the release of emissions. Deforestation, however, not only emits carbon, but it also destroys an important tool—the trees that help clean the air of those emissions.

§  The average tree absorbs about 21.77 Kilograms of carbon a year, and large swaths of forest like the Amazon rainforest are considered carbon sinks, in that the region stores much more carbon than it emits.

§  That benefit lasts as long as the forest is kept intact, but researchers in Brazil are desperately trying to warn politicians and the public that the region could reach a tipping point. Deforested beyond repair, the Amazon may not be able to recover and could significantly alter the world’s climate.

§  Individuals should change the way they eat to support a healthy planet. Cutting back on eating meat and reducing food waste are two areas the report highlights as way individuals can live more sustainably.