It was a side event, but offered good inputs for the main conference. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) meeting during recently concluded climate change talks in Bonn highlighted the importance of having a climate change agreement that creates an enabling environment for adaptation and mitigation by poor farmers in developing countries. The IFPRI position is based on its policy briefs written by leading global climate change experts.
Gerald C Nelson, a senior research fellow at IFPRI emphasises that international climate negotiations must include agriculture if climate change mitigation and adaptation goals are to be met. Agriculture and climate change are inextricably linked. Agriculture is part of the climate change problem, contributing about 13.5% of annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (with forestry contributing an additional 19%), compared with 13.1% from transportation. Agriculture is, however, also part of the solution, offering promising opportunities for mitigating GHG emissions through carbon sequestration, soil and land use management, and biomass production.
An IFPRI brief highlights that climate change threatens agricultural production through higher and more variable temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns and increased occurrences of extreme events such as droughts and floods. And if agriculture is not included, or not well-included, in the international climate change negotiations leading up to the COP15 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, resulting climate change policies could threaten poor farming communities and smallholders in many developing countries.
The policies could also impede the ability of smallholders to partake in economic opportunities that might arise from the negotiations. Therefore, agriculture must be on the Copenhagen agenda. Indeed, it must be on the agenda of negotiators well before COP15. Essentially, three avenues must be pursued, including investments, incentives and information, Gerald C Nelson highlights.
The impacts of climate change on agriculture are likely to be regionally distinct and highly heterogeneous spatially, requiring sophisticated understanding of causes and effects and careful design and dissemination of appropriate responses. These changes will challenge the livelihoods of farmers, fishers, and forest-dependent people who are already vulnerable and food insecure. Adapting to these changes, while continuing to feed a world of nine billion people, requires the formation of a global partnership in science, technology development, and dissemination of results to millions of smallholder farmers, bringing together research workers and resource managers from many fields. To take an international approach to climate change, new partnerships must be forged, linking the agricultural research and climate science communities, says Rudy Rabbinge, who is also chair of CGIAR?s Science Council.
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a strategic partnership, whose members support 15 international centres and five major collaborative programmes around the world. The CGIAR plans to contribute its broad-based and multi-disciplinary experience in developing-country agriculture to global efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change through research on agriculture and natural resources. Work already underway that is directly applicable to climate change research includes breeding crops for stress tolerance; developing better practices for sustainable crop and environmental management; gauging the vulnerability of agriculture, natural resources, and rural communities; and supporting the development of policies conducive to sustainable agricultural growth.
Further, the CGIAR?s Consortium for Spatial Information is taking the initiative with other centres of excellence to create a climate information portal for mapping data. The Climate Change Challenge Programme is uniting the expertise of the CGIAR with the Earth System Science Partnership to close critical knowledge gaps on how to deal with trade-offs among food security, livelihood, and environmental goals as climate changes.
The current climate change scenarios demand adaptation to temperature increases, changing amounts of available water, climatic instability and increased frequency of extreme weather events, and rises in sea level and saline intrusion in the coastal zones. Thus future crop farming and food systems will have to be better adapted to a range of abiotic stresses (such as heat or salinity) and biotic stresses (such as pests) to cope with the consequences of a progressively changing climate. In response, the CGIAR is working on gene discovery and improving plant tolerance for heat, drought, and submergence. This work should be expanded to consider the basic energy and water efficiency of plants.
It is crucial to add value to current investment in agronomic crop management and germplasm improvements by integrating new results and best practices from these fields into adaptation options proposed in the policy domain. There may well be major land use changes, and research will be needed to identify and assess options to support the transitions this will impose on farmers and other actors within the food system, Rudy Rabbinge adds.