What’s at Stake for
Agriculture in COP 18?
The biggest threat for agriculture at
the 18th Conference of Parties (COP) of the UNFCCC is
the certain likelihood (oxymoron intended) of “non-decisions” for setting
ambitious emissions reduction targets for the post-2012 period, when the Kyoto
Protocol’s first commitment period expires. Bill McKibben’s widely circulated
article Global Warming's Terrifying New Math tells
us in starkly clear terms what we need to do to set things right:
We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as
climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those
reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those
numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it
seems certain.
McKibben lays out in simple terms what we policy advocates and
scientists have failed to do thus far: convince the average citizen in the
industrialized world why immediate, ambitious and drastic cuts in our fossil
fuel use is necessary to prevent the deadliest impacts of global warming, not
just for future generations, but for this generation. Yet, government
representatives will be going to the climate talks prepared to take years to
cobble together a legally binding deal to cut emissions worth the paper they
sign.
We are nearly three-quarters of the way to using the maximum
gigatons of carbon scientists thought we could “safely” use until 2050 to
prevent catastrophic climate impacts. The time to turn this around is the next
sixteen years—this means we must hit our peak fossil fuel use within the next
six to seven years, and this is exactly what governments will be discussing in
Doha: what to do in the next six to seven years on climate change. For all
governments going to the COP, and especially for the United States, this is
neither an election issue nor one that will result in a political crisis.
Hurricane Sandy might have done more to convince Americans (on the East Coast,
anyway) of the consequences of non-action than anything else has to date.
Devastation of agriculture and food systems worldwide, of
course, will be one major calamity of this non-action. We already see it in the
droughts in the Midwest, the floods in Pakistan and Australia and the erratic
weather patterns that are making it difficult for food growers today. All this
with just a .8-degree temperature rise in the past century. Scientists now know
that even a total two degree temperature rise (the number governments have
finally agreed on as the global limit) is too much.
Yet, the discussions in Doha around
agriculture are surprisingly not about the devastation of non-action on food
systems. The COP 18 discussions will be about how to address agriculture in the Subsidiary Body for Scientific
and Technical Advice (SBSTA), a technical body that provides advice
and responds to scientific, technological and methodological questions from the
COP and the Kyoto Protocol Parties. IATP has long insisted that the
primary focus of agriculture discussions in the UNFCCC must
be on how agriculture and small producers can adapt to climate change and how
this adaptation challenge can be financed. If we truly want to address
agriculture emissions, let’s start by setting targets for reducing nitrous
oxides and methane from industrial farms and transitioning to agroecological
practices. Yet, the World Bank, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and
other industrialized countries have pushed since 2008 to find in agriculture another big loophole to hide their actual emissions by
developing offsets in the land use and land-use change sectors(which
include forestry and agriculture) and trading them on speculative financial
markets in the form of carbon credits.
So far, developing countries have stemmed
the tide, but the World Bank has been lobbying several developing-country
agriculture ministries to influence their environment ministries to say “yes”
to a work program that would help them create these carbon offsets. The irony
here is that the entire African continent contributes less than 4 percent to
the very problem that will devastate their food production systems, meanwhile
Africans are being asked to do their bit to mitigate rather than North
Americans whose per capita emissions are 14 times that of our counterparts in
Africa. Though the very existence of the Kyoto Protocol (KP) and the second
commitment period (2013–2020) hang in the balance of the enormous deadlock in
the UNFCCC, the last meeting of the Kyoto Protocol Parties (CMP) at COP 17 in
Durban requested the SBSTA to start work programmes on 1.) the
possibility of expanding the activities that could be included for accounting
in LULUCF (Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry),
i.e., inclusion certain agricultural activities such as soil carbon) 2.)
possibilities of expanding the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to include
additional land use, land-use change and forestry activities (i.e., soil
carbon) and 3.) figure out how to get carbon credits for soil and better
credits for forest carbon in the CDM even though science is demonstrating that
carbon cannot be stored permanently in agriculture or forest systems for a
large number of scientific and technical reasons. Officially, the
decision from Durban on this work program was phrased in the following arcane
manner:
...a work programme to consider and, as appropriate, develop and
recommend modalities and procedures for alternative approaches to addressing
the risk of nonpermanence under the clean development mechanism with a view to
forwarding a draft decision on this matter to the Conference of the Parties
serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol for adoption at its
ninth session [in late 2013] (para 7, Decision 2/CMP.7)
In addition, the SBSTA was asked to
initiate a work program to determine how to address “additionality” in LULUCF.
The program would focus on how governments can prove that the practices being
adopted to reduce emissions or absorb carbon in the soil or forests is
actually additional to what they would have done in the
first place in a business as usual scenario. A critical question here: how
would they even know it is additional given the problems related to
non-permanence?
McKibben’s math is indeed terrifyingly simple: we have 565
gigatons of carbon as a global community to spend to limit a global temperature
rise to 2 degrees (which scientists say is already too much) with a window of
time that is closing on us. The coal, gas and oil reserves that have already
been bought and paid for, but as of yet remain unused, total 2795
gigatons: five times the number we can justify and still have a livable planet.
Keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than playing shell games with
agriculture and forests, and determining equitable burden sharing between
developed and developing countries, are the urgent tasks at hand. And, while we
are doing that, we need to begin cleaning up the mess that’s already been
created, particularly as peasants, fisherfolk and pastoralists struggle to cope
with increasing climate chaos.
In contrast, the government representatives
that get paid by our tax dollars to negotiate the climate treaty are truly
having a difficult time distinguishing the forest from the trees. How long will
we allow governments and intergovernmental organizations (who are also paid
with tax dollars) to continue this game of smoke and mirrors with carbon sinks and carbon
markets? The next six to seven years are literally game changers in humanity’s
ability to tackle climate change. It’s time we all (especially us in the United
States) made this a clear political mandate for our governments.
© 2012 IATP
Shefali
Sharma is a senior advisor with the Institute for Agriculture and Tr
Source: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/26-3
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