Carbon Farming Gets A Nod At Paris Climate
Conference
Updated December 7, 201512:03 PM ET
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/07/458063708/carbon-farming-gets-a-nod-at-paris-climate-conference
ALASTAIR BLAND
Las Cañadas is an ecological cooperative in Veracruz, Mexico that's
working to sequester carbon and mitigate climate change while producing
food, materials, chemicals and energy.
Courtesy of Ricardo Romero/Chelsea Green Publishing
This week, world leaders
are hashing out a binding agreement in Paris at the 2015 U.N. Climate
Change Conference for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. And for the first
time,
they've made the capture of carbon in soil a formal part of the
global response to the climate crisis.
"This is a game changer because soil carbon is now central to how
the world manages climate change. I am stunned," says
André Leu, president of
IFOAM — Organics International, an organization that promotes organic
agriculture and carbon farming worldwide.
Leu is referring to the United Nations Lima-Paris Action Agenda, a sort
of side deal aimed at "robust global action towards low carbon and
resilient societies." On Dec. 1, countries, businesses and NGOs
signed on to a series of new commitments under the agenda, including
several on agriculture.
Currently, the Earth's atmosphere contains
about 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Eric Toensmeier, a
lecturer at Yale and the author of
The
Carbon Farming Solution, a book due out in February, says the
atmosphere's carbon dioxide levels must be cut to 350 parts per million
or lower to curb climate change.
Toensmeier and Leu are among a growing number of environmental advocates
who say one of the best opportunities for drawing carbon back to Earth is
for farmers and other land managers to try to sequester more carbon in
the soil.
"Reducing emissions is essential, but eventually it still gets us to
catastrophic climate change," says Toensmeier, who's attending the
Paris talks on behalf of the group
Project Drawdown. "The level
of emissions in the atmosphere now is already past a tipping point. That
means we have to sequester carbon."
The Center for Food Safety created a video in November explaining how
soil can help solve climate change.
YouTube
Using photosynthesis, plants draw carbon from the air and deposit it in
the soil. And farming is a simple way of growing crops and managing soil
that, under the right conditions, encourages the buildup of carbon in the
ground. In addition to countering global warming, carbon-rich soil can be
more productive and hold water better than soil with lower carbon
content.
There are two basic ways for farmers to capture it, says
Connor
Stedman, an agricultural consultant in the Hudson Valley with the
firm AppleSeed Permaculture.
"You can put carbon in soil, and you can put carbon in long-lived
perennial plants, especially trees," says Stedman.
And you can start, according to Torri Estrada, managing director with the
Carbon Cycle Institute in
northern California, by disturbing the land as little as
possible.
In conventional industrial agriculture, the soil is often tilled or
plowed to disrupt weeds and prepare the land for planting. But turning
the soil this way (or overgrazing animals on rangelands) introduces
oxygen to the carbon. The carbon and oxygen then can bond into carbon
dioxide – a greenhouse gas.
As food production has intensified, between 50 and 80 percent of the soil
carbon has been lost around the world,
according to researchers at the Ohio State University's Carbon
Management and Sequestration Center.
Gabe Brown grows oats, alfalfa, peas, clover and other field crops in
North Dakota. He says that when he bought his land in 1991, his soil's
carbon level registered at a dismal 1.9 percent on average. "It was
a tan, lifeless powder," says Brown, who delivers seminars around
the nation on carbon farming and has become a sort of guru of the
movement.
But then he decided not to till or plow to boost carbon levels in his
soil. And his efforts have paid off. "Now, [the soil] looks like
black cottage cheese," he says, adding that his yields are as much
as 25 percent greater than those of conventional farms nearby, and his
soil is up to 6 percent carbon on average.
According to Stedman, healthy, undisturbed soil rich in organic matter
can contain anywhere from 8 to 20 percent carbon. In addition to minimal
tilling and plowing, another way to sequester carbon in soil is to add
compost. Cover crops add carbon, too, and also reduce erosion.
But to make a real dent in the carbon dioxide emissions – and climate
change — with carbon farming, Stedman says farmers globally would have to
deposit on average just over 25 tons of atmospheric carbon into each acre
of the Earth's arable land. That could take decades. And that assumes
carbon emissions could also be halted and that all farmers in the world
actually participate. Stedman says that, realistically, since only some
farmers will be actively trying to sequester carbon in coming decades, it
may require depositing much more than 25 tons per acre.
There's another possible wrinkle in the scheme, says Peter
Donovan, a board member of the
Soil Carbon Coalition. As
carbon is drawn from the atmosphere and into the Earth, the ocean will
release some of its own carbon into the air, which could substantially
offset the progress of sequestration.
Ecologist Brock
Dolman agrees the task at hand is massive.
"Business as usual with conventional agriculture is just
contributing to greenhouse gases, soil erosion, ocean dead zones, all of
the above," says Dolman, co-founder of the Occidental Arts and
Ecology Center in northern California, which promotes sustainable
agriculture. "But to not move forward with carbon farming ... well,
somebody would have to tell me what else we are going to
do."
There are signs beyond the
Lima-Paris Action Agenda, announced in Paris on Dec. 1, that the
carbon farming movement is moving forward.
The Carbon Cycle Institute is working with local governments to teach the
basics of carbon farming to growers and ranchers around
California.
In France, the Ministry of Agriculture, Agrifood and Forestry has
launched an international
campaign to increase soil carbon content.
There are other ways
to sequester carbon besides agriculture and forestry, such as capturing
emissions from power plants and piping the carbon to underground storage
spaces.
But Estrada says doing so by farming makes the most sense.
"Photosynthesis and soil has been working for billions of
years," he says. "It's the longest running [research and
development] project around, so why not use the simple, well proven one
that we know works?"
Alastair Bland is a freelance writer based in San Francisco who covers
food, agriculture and the environment.
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
http://www.sbpermaculture.org
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