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Publications and Reports » Details
Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet
In: State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World
Sara J Scherr, Sajal Sthapit - Ecoagriculture Partners, Ecoagricutlure Partners
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Abstract
For more than a decade, thousands of low income farmers in northern Mindanao, the Philippines, who grow crops on steep, deforested slopes, have joined landcare groups to boost food production and incomes while reducing soil erosion, improving soil fertility, and protecting local watersheds. They left strips of natural vegetation to terrace their slopes, enriched their soils, and planted fruit and timber trees for income. And their communities began conserving the remaining forests in the area, home to a rich but threatened biodiversity. Yet these farmers achieved even more their actions not only enriched their landscapes and enhanced food security, they also helped to cool the planet by cutting greenhouse gas emissions and storing carbon in soils and vegetation. If their actions could be repeated by millions of rural communities around the world, climate change would slow down.
State of the World 2009: About the Book
It is New Year’s Day, 2101. Somehow, humanity survived the worst of global warming — the higher temperatures and sea levels and the more intense droughts and storms — and succeeded in stabilizing Earth’s climate. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations peaked a few decades ago and are expected to continue their downward drift throughout the twenty-second century. Global temperatures are slowly returning to their pre-warming levels. The natural world is gradually healing. The social contract largely held. And humanity as a whole is better fed, healthier, and more prosperous today than it was a century ago. What did humanity do in the twenty-first century—and especially in 2009 and the years immediately following — to snatch a threatened world from the jaws of climate change catastrophe?
Document Stats:
| Release Date: | January 2009 |
| File Type: |  [PDF] |
| File Size: | 464 KB |
| Journal: | State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World |
