Diana Donlon - Introduction: Food and Farming
- 1. Food & Climate Connecting the Dots Diana Donlon Cool Foods Campaign Director, Center for Food Safety Tufts University November 22, 2014
- 2. The Global Food System has been ignored as a source of GHGs. It has also been overlooked as a source of global solutions. Climate change is an immediate threat to food production. Agro-ecological practices, including organic, are the means by which we will be able to achieve food security in an era of climate disruption.
- 3. The Anthropocene Climate Change Manifestations • Extreme Weather • Deluge & Drought • Shifting Weather Patterns • Rising Temperatures
- 4. Extreme Weather Extreme Weather
- 5. Deluge & Drought • IPCC: Rainfall patterns will shift • More intense precipitation events by early 21st century • Prolonged, acute drought by late 21st century • Estimated annual water deficit is 160 billion tons • The water needed to produce 160 million tons of grain. • 533 million people are fed with grain produced with unsustainable water use.
- 6. Shifting Weather Patterns • Earlier Springs, Warmer Winters • Higher survival rates of pathogens • Northern migration of invasive species • Shifting spatial and temporal distributions of pathogens
- 7. Rising Temperatures • IPCC: 1982-2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1,400 years. • IPCC: Warming will continue through 2100. • More frequent, warmer nights. • Evaporation and Evapotranspiration
- 9. Where is carbon going? Carbon is constantly cycling through major pools. • Too much carbon in the atmosphere is heating the planet. • Too much carbon in the ocean is causing it to acidify. • But, carbon in the soil not only has the capacity to absorb excess carbon, it is beneficial.
- 10. Carbon is “plant food” and plants can rapidly transfer carbon from sky to soil.
- 11. Cool Foods sees soil health as the key to solving multiple food and climate problems. we need to rebuild soil organic matter on a global scale.
- 13. is part of an emerging community communicating “soil solutions to climate problems.” Thank you “Bio4Climate” for helping us disseminate this critical message!
Editor's Notes
- Scientists are reluctant to link specific climate events to climate change. However, climate change is affecting the temperature and moisture under which storms are created. Topography, regional weather systems, proximity to large bodies of water, and local land-use changes all affect regional climate changes.
- However… many current and future impacts in regards to food production.
- Generally areas with already high rainfall will experience more rain and areas with low rainfall will experience less rain. http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/epr/Epr1_ss9
- World Health Organization: We may be entering the 4th great transitional period of infectious diseases. Early human settlements. Enabled endemic infective species to enter humans. Early Eurasian civilizations came into military contact around 2000 years ago. European expansions overseas. http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/climatechangechap6.pdf
- Earlier IPCC reports predicted a net benefit to food production from climate change. The most recent report cites a large body of research that demonstrates how sensitive plants are to heat waves. Evapotranspiration – is the process of transferring moisture from the earth to the atmosphere by evaporation of water and transpiration from plants.
- These variations in CO2 come from the natural variations in the carbon cycle. Every year as temperatures warm, plants and forests soak up CO2 from the atmosphere dropping the atmospheric concentrations of CO2. 6-7 ppm per season.
- Peat – which holds crazy amounts of carbon – so much so that it is used as fuel and emits more CO2 than coal or natural gas!
- Systems solution to a systems problem!