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Agriculture and Climate Change
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CIAT is the lead center of the CGIAR global research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) that will be operational in early 2011. CCAFS continues the activities of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Climate Change. |
Part of the problem and part of the solution
The recent work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has left no doubt about the inevitability of this human-induced phenomenon. The average temperature of the earth’s surface, having already risen by 0.74 °C in the last 100 years, will continue to increase over the next century, most likely by 3 °C or so, as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.
This finding is widely known and accepted, in no small part because the IPCC, together with former vice president of the United States Al Gore, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. But a key dimension of the climate change threat—the role of agriculture—has so far been ignored, even though it was well documented by the IPCC.
The panel estimated that agriculture and deforestation (which is driven to a large degree by clearing for crop and livestock production) account for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture’s direct emissions (about 14%) come from various sources, including the release of carbon through tillage, of nitrous oxide through fertilizer use and of methane from livestock and irrigated rice production.
The IPCC also described the profound impacts that climate change is expected to have on agriculture in the tropics and subtropics. The average yields of major food crops could drop by about a third in the coming decades because of higher temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, greater disease and pest pressures, and more frequent occurrence of severe weather.
Since agriculture is a significant part of the climate change problem, then it must also be enlisted as part of the solution. Fortunately, improved technologies are already available—like hardier crop varieties and more efficient ways to manage water, trees, soils, livestock, fish, and forests—that will contribute importantly to climate change adaptation and mitigation, as they are more widely disseminated. There is also plenty of scope for further research aimed at developing new and more potent solutions, guided by a better understanding of climate change and its impacts.
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