From October 15th  – 16th, 2012 EcoAgriculture Partners participated in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) launch of a project to provide institutional support to New Partnerships for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and Regional Economic Commissions (RECs) to scale-up sustainable land management (SLM) in sub-Saharan Africa. EcoAgriculture Partners participated in the meeting as a strategic partner of TerrAfrica in the implementing a capacity building project for the RECs. The project aims to contribute through:

COMMITTEE ON WORLD FOOD SECURITY

Food Security and Climate Change

October 15, 2012

Contribution by EcoAgriculture Partners:

I am Sara Scherr of EcoAgriculture Partners, an NGO working globally to promote landscapes

that provide the full range of agricultural products, energy, water, ecosystem services and rural

livelihoods and well-being. I am speaking on behalf of the Landscapes for People, Food and

Nature Initiative, a partnership formed in 2011 with membership cutting across UN agencies,

NGOs, Governments and farmer organizations, to strengthen and scale up whole landscape

approaches to development.

It is our shared conviction that to achieve climate resilience for food security, it is essential that

all land and resource uses in the landscape are aligned to jointly support food security objectives.

In addition to sustainable and agroecological practices, forests must be managed to reduce flood

risks; watersheds restored with year-round vegetation to recharge groundwater for households

and irrigation, coastal habitats maintained to protect fisheries. We need to find allies beyond the

agriculture and nutrition sectors.

While the High-Level Report did note the importance of this issue, it is missing from the

Decision Box. Thus we propose that the CFS document for Agenda Item III-b for the Policy

Roundtable on Food Security and Climate Change (matters to be brought to the attention of the

Committee), include in point 2a language that specifies:

“Actively aligning policies, investments and programs of the natural resource sectors with those

of agriculture, nutrition and food security to achieve food-secure, climate-resilient landscapes.”

On July 6-8, 2010, EcoAgriculture Partners, jointly with the NEPAD Agency, World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations Foundation, convened the “Dialogue Towards a Shared Action Framework for Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change in Africa” at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Como, Italy.    

The group shared diverse perspectives on the interface between sectors, explored strategies for policy integration, and committed to collaborate in concrete follow-up actions at African regional and national levels. Discussions were frank and realistic, yet also full of concrete examples of policy models for integration that have already been tested in different parts of the continent.  After an exploration of the perspectives and processes associated with integration, the group committed to several collaborative action initiatives. 

Two new publications document the Dialogue: 

1. a Policy Brief, part of the Ecoagriculture Policy Focus series, outlines key messages from the Dialogue.
2. a Workshop Report gives an overview of the proceedings of the Dialogue; please email cwallace@ecoagriculture.org to request a copy.  

Below is an opinion piece originally published in the recent SinergiA newsletter - a collaboration between five Latin American PES networks. This edition of SinergiA focuses on agriculture's growing role in payments for ecosystem services schemes, and offers opinions, tools and methodologies, projects, publications, and events related to PES and agriculture in Latin America. SinergiA is available in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.

Though largely ignored in the rush to REDD, we contend that agricultural carbon initiatives are equally important to land-based carbon markets, both in Latin America and internationally. Without agricultural components, the integrity and viability of REDD projects is compromised, and the opportunity to develop carbon projects with strong co-benefits for food security, poverty reduction and ecosystem restoration is missed.

Agriculture accounts for 20% of total emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Large-scale commercial farms and ranches emit carbon via high use of fertilizer, tillage, irrigation and livestock wastes. Small - scale farmers live in landscape mosaics which store considerable carbon in perennial forest fragments, pastures, palms, hedges, scattered trees and crops. The landscapes contribute to emissions with widespread soil and vegetation degradation. The largest driver of deforestation is agriculture; its exclusion from climate mitigation frameworks makes REDD programs unsustainable.

Carbon markets must evolve to include agricultural mitigation activities. Examples include: reduced soil tillage intensity, reduced soil erosion, perennial crops that maintain root and branch systems year-round, vegetative soil cover, permanent vegetative cover in non-cropped areas, increased biomass in grazing systems through improved varieties and management, improved fertilizer use efficiency, improved livestock waste management and utilization of methane emissions for biogas; and reduced fossil energy use in farm operations. Such practices reduce farm risks and production costs, improve farmer incomes, protecting watershed services and conserve biodiversity. These benefits often exceed those of carbon payments in helping farmers shift to sustainable and profitable systems.

A movement is building to expand agricultural carbon markets globally. Certification standards are proliferating within voluntary markets. In regulatory markets, a work program on agriculture appears likely under the UNFCCC SBSTA coming out of the December COP in Cancun. It's time to move from small projects to whole supply chains and large landscape initiatives that support sustainable development.

Innovators in Latin America are leaders in mechanisms which reward farmers for stewardship.

• The Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Ecosystem Management Project piloted the use of payments to promote carbon sequestration along with biodiversity conservation, through silvopastoral practices in degraded pastures in Colombia, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
• CEDECO (Corporaciã³n Educativa para el Desarrollo Costarricense), is developing the potential of small-scale organic farming in Costa Rica, Cuba and Brazil to reduce GHG emissions and sequester carbon, and exploring the potential of landscape-scale projects for 'carbon-plus-biodiversity' that could be branded by the conservation values they achieve.
• Numerous regional projects are re-establishing or improving shade in coffee and cocoa plantations for carbon sequestration, and agricultural product certification programs are experimenting with climate-friendly labeling.

Despite inadequate field measurements in most Latin American farming systems, cost-effective MRV (monitoring, reporting, and verification) methods for field, farms and landscapes are rapidly developing. Colombia, Chile and Uruguay have joined the new Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases, now focused on high-input commercial systems. FAO is establishing a center to collect GHG emissions data for diverse farming systems.

To be financially viable, agricultural carbon projects need to reduce transaction costs, reduce costs of aggregating large numbers of farmers in climate deals, reduce risks to farmers, and empower them to negotiate reasonable agreements. Fortunately, the agricultural sector can build carbon projects on existing institutions such as farmer cooperatives, agribusiness outgrowing schemes, and territorial development initiatives. Costs can be reduced with improved local capacity for project development and management, access to project pre-financing, and simplified MRV. Latin American leaders must engage in structuring logical, functional, and regionally appropriate agricultural carbon finance systems.

Also posted on EKOECO.

Article title: "Fincas agroforestales contrarrestan pérdida de biodiversidad en el país" on La Nacion on 23 September 2010.

La combinación de actividades agrícolas y conservación del bosque se conoce como sistema agroforestal, y optar por él es tan simple como incluir árboles en la plantación o construir cercas vivas (formadas con árboles).

Según informes recientes de las Naciones Unidas, actualmente las especies de plantas y animales se pierden a un ritmo 100 veces mayor al natural.

Aumentan especies. Según Fabrice DeClerck, ecólogo de Comunidades y Paisaje, del Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (Catie), estudios realizados por esta institución han comprobado que en una finca agroforestal se observan más especies.

“Si en los alrededores de una cerca de postes muertos hay un promedio de 12 especies, una cerca viva puede tener entre 40 y 50 especies”, dijo DeClerck.

Otro ejemplo lo da el Proyecto de Cacao Centroamérica (PCC), una iniciativa del Catie y socios locales, que trabajan junto con 6.000 familias de seis países para aumentar la productividad de este cultivo sin dañar el ambiente.

Como parte del proyecto se han investigado las poblaciones de anfibios y reptiles.

En este sentido, se han registrado 22 especies de ranas y sapos en Talamanca, lo que representa el 10% del total de especies de este grupo que viven en Costa Rica.

Para Rolando Cerdas, responsable del PCC para Costa Rica y Panamá, esto evidencia la similitud existente en un sistema agroforestal de cacao.

“En un cacaotal de este tipo, la planta tira un montón de hojarasca y esto se vuelve un lugar ideal para anfibios y reptiles, así como para mamíferos que andan buscando sombra”, añadió Cerdas.

Una relación ganar-ganar. Asimismo, el finquero puede beneficiarse de los servicios que da el bosque en cuanto polinización, control de plagas, nutrientes y conservación del suelo y fuentes de agua.

“Por ejemplo, hemos medido y comparado la temperatura en las cercas vivas y las pasturas donde no hay sombra. En la época seca se han visto diferencias de hasta 10° Celsius”, dijo DeClerck.

Precisamente, el estrés térmico es una de las razones de baja productividad en ganado, y afecta en especial a las vacas que dan leche.

Una alta biodiversidad también ayuda con el control de plagas como la broca del café.

“En una de las investigaciones se colocaron trampas para la broca, tanto en el cafetal como en el bosque, y nos dimos cuenta de que los cafetales rodeados de árboles tenían menos problemas. El bosque cumple una función de barrera”, comentó el ecólogo del Catie.

Todos esos beneficios ambientales se traducen en una mayor y mejor producción.

Según un estudio de Taylor H. Ricketts en el 2004, publicado por la revista PNAS, un cafetal situado a 300 metros del bosque es más productivo y tiene menos frutos malformados que otro a un kilómetro de distancia.

Es más, el bosque de la finca que sirvió de objeto de estudio contribuyó con el equivalente a $60.000 en la producción total, lo cual representó el 7% de los ingresos de ese año.

“Claro, sin mercado o incentivos es muy difícil para los productores sostener un sistema agroforestal, pero existen oportunidades y cada vez son más”, apuntó Jeffrey Milder, director de Investigación de Socios para la Ecoagricultura, en referencia a los mercados diferenciados, donde se obtienen mejores precios si los productores cuentan con certificación ambiental.

Alternativa para ciudades. Para DeClerck, este modelo mixto podría replicarse en las urbes.

Debido a la combustión de fuentes fósiles y el reflejo de los rayos solares por el asfalto, las ciudades tienden a convertirse en “islas de calentamiento”.

Una mayor cobertura boscosa no solo ayudaría a reducir ese calor, también serviría de filtro de polución, lo cual mejoraría la calidad del aire. Además, se protegerían las fuentes de agua y se garantizaría el abastecimiento.

Sajal Sthapit, from EcoAgriculture Partners and Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD), gave the context setting presentation and participated at the Climate Integration Workshop in Begnas, Kaski district, Nepal. 

Mr. Kul Chandra Adhikari, a local farmer, shares his group's work at the Climate Integration Workshop. Photo: Mahesh Shrestha, LI-BIRD

LI-BIRD, with funding from  The Development Fund of Norway, organized the workshop on 24-28 June 2010 at the Begnas Resort in Pokhara to help integrate climate change into development projects.

The first objective of the workshop was to create a common understanding among the various actors on the vulnerability of local communities in Nepal to climate change. The second objective was to understand ways of addressing climate change adaptation in development projects in order to avoid maladaptation and increase people’s resilience to climate change in the long term.

Climate change is increasingly accepted as a major issue facing Nepali communities. The Initial National Communication to UNFCCC and a range of other studies have shown that Nepal is highly vulnerable to negative impacts of climate change. The scenarios of climate change in Nepal predict significant warming particularly at higher elevations. Climate change will lead to reduction in snow and ice cover, increase the frequency of climate induced disasters including floods and droughts, and cause uneven precipitation over the regional scale.

Climate induced risks and hazards can have wide ranging, often unanticipated, effects on the environment and on socio-economic and development related sectors, including agriculture and food security, water resources, energy, human health and urban settlement. Poor and vulnerable communities of Nepal, therefore, face possible dramatic impacts on their livelihood and well-being. Impacts have been increasingly evident and damaging in Nepal in the past decade. Loss of arable lands to floods and erratic changes in monsoon, water shortages and droughts are constraining food production. Communities in high elevations face growing threats from Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs). Invasion of exotic species, outbreak of diseases, sharp and sustained decline in food security and threats to biodiversity are all palpable risks for the people of Nepal.

For most marginalized people, climate change is one more stress factor, coming on top of any number of other challenges they are facing, poverty being a major one. Development practitioners now recognize that promotion of development paths that make households and communities more resilient to climatic stresses can also help to reduce poverty in more robust and sustainable ways. There is, at the same time, a growing realization that a failure to take climate change into account can undermine poverty reduction efforts and their intended social, economic and environmental benefits.

There is a need for greater understanding on how to design poverty reduction projects and programs in ways that increase the capacity of individuals, households and communities to respond to climate variability and change.

Global Biodiversity Outlook is the flagship publication of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Drawing on a range of information sources, including National Reports, biodiversity indicators information, scientific literature, and a study assessing biodiversity scenarios for the future [4MB], the third edition of Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) summarizes the latest data on status and trends of biodiversity and draws conclusions for the future strategy of the Convention.

Read the report online at: http://gbo3.cbd.int/the-outlook/gbo3.aspx

Download the PDF [14MB]: http://gbo3.cbd.int/media/2721/gbo_en_web.pdf

BBC News reports,

The Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies, a major UN report has warned.

The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) says that some ecosystems may soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.

Such tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death.

From: BBC News

Last month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010.

"The news is not good," said Ahmed Djoglaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). "We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history - extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate."

The global abundance of vertebrates - the group that includes mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish - fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006, the UN says.

The 2010 target of significantly curbing the global rate of biodiversity loss was agreed at the Johannesburg summit in 2002.

It has been clear for a while that it would not be met. But GBO-3 concludes that none of the 21 subsidiary targets set at the same time are being met either, at least not on a global basis.

These include measures such as curbing the rate of habitat loss and degradation, protecting at least 10% of the Earth's ecological regions, controlling the spread of invasive species and making sure that international trade does not take any species towards extinction.

Read the full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10103179.stm

Dear Colleagues,

Please see this schedule (MS Excel) of Ecoagriculture Partners organized and ecoagriculture related events at COP 15 over the next two weeks.

At the Agriculture and Rural Development Day on December 12, Sara J. Scherr will be presenting at Roundtable 3 and Ecoagriculture Partners is organizing two Ideas Marketplace sessions.

Sara Scherr will be in Copenhagen December 10-13 and Seth Shames from December 9-14. Please contact Seth at sshames@ecoagriculture.org if you’d like to meet up.

Best,

Sara and Seth 

Ecoagriculture Partners Events at the Agriculture and Rural Development day at the COP 15 (12 December 2009)

Resources

• EP's Events and other related events of interest in Excel Spreadsheet
• Full list of Programmes Agriculture and Rural Development day