EcoRadio

Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.

  • Wheat gamble in Western Australia falters

    Mr Tutt said WA was now facing the very real possibility of a 7.5mt harvest.

    He said this season was taking a similar path to last year with patchy, dry conditions preventing many crops from going in the ground.

    The prediction was made after Rural Business Development Corporation (RBDC) chairman Dexter Davies conducted an urgent visit to the Esperance region last week.

    Mr Davies reviewed the dry conditions on farms in the area at the request of Esperance Shire president Ian Mickel, who has also written a letter to Agriculture Minister Kim Chance outlining the situation’s severity and seeking assistance.

    Mr Davies said the situation was serious but warned it was not a crisis “at this stage”.

    He warned the dry conditions were getting particularly stark for growers in the eastern part of the region, especially those with livestock.

  • Soil carbon scheme takes off in USA

    Since 2003, the CCX has traded soil carbon under a broad zone system that assumes that over specific land types, under certain practices like minimum tillage or rotational grazing, an average amount of soil carbon will be generated.

    “Midwestern US soils that have adequate rainfall and good crop potential receive 0.6 metric tons of credit per year,” Mr Miller said.

    “The drier, less productive soils of the southern Plains states receive 0.2 metric tons of credit per year.”

    Arid desert soils, and some sandy soils in Florida are excluded from the system.

    “I believe that the CCX approach of establishing the scientific mean, but then using a credit rate that is discounted by some amount—such as 20pc as CCX does—is an appropriate way to set a rate that has strong statistical validity,” said Mr Miller.

    “With a credit rate that is discounted from the mean, the statistical probability of an agricultural-based credit delivering at least as much sequestration as is credited is greatly enhanced.”

    Perhaps as importantly as the small offset credits received by farmers—ranging from $3-$7 a ton—engagement with the CCX has driven interest and research into greenhouse gas sequestration.

    “We have protocols developed and implemented for no-till, grasslands, rangeland management, afforestation, managed forests, agricultural methane destruction at livestock facilities, and biomass substitution for coal,” Mr Miller said.

    “We have producers enrolled, projects verified, credits registered and traded and producers paid. That represents substantial achievement towards development of a new market and all of the market infrastructure that is required to have a well functioning and successful market.”

    The CCX traded 23 million tons of carbon credits in 2007, under a fully voluntary system.

    Closer to home, Alex McBratney, Professor of Soil Science at the University of Sydney, is working on a similar discount methodology that he believes may have the scientific rigour to get soil carbon into the Kyoto II protocol to be thrashed out in 2012.

    “It’s based on the best statistical sampling theory that we can muster, and some new technology,” Prof. McBratney said.

    “The methodology will tell you how much carbon you’ve fixed over five years, across a whole farm—not a plot or paddock—and it will also tell you the uncertainty on that number.”

    So far his research has been unfunded, but he is hopeful that an application before the Australian Research Council will get the project up and running.

    “Agriculture needs to be in the carbon trading system,” Prof. McBratney said.

    “Soil has the ability to sequester carbon. The only issue is whether you can audit it. But unless you can actually sequester carbon somewhere, I don’t see how the cap-and-trade system actually works—so we need some sinks for carbon.”

  • Farmers sink carbon and improve soil

    Dr Jones told the inquiry agricultural soils have the capacity to sequester large volumes of atmospheric carbon by “rebuilding” robust agricultural soils, which would also “enhance the resilience of the Australian landscape to withstand changes to climate” she said.

    An added benefit would be that expenditure on fuel, fertiliser and chemical inputs would be significantly reduced, she said.

    “As a bonus, sequestering carbon in soils represents a practical, permanent and productive solution to removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere,” Dr Jones said.

    “It would require only a 0.5pc increase in soil carbon on 2pc of Australia’s agricultural land to sequester all greenhouse gas emissions.

    “That is, the annual emissions from all industrial, urban and transport sources could be sequestered in farmland soils if incentive was provided to landholders for this to happen.”

    While some farmers are fearful of having soil carbon included in an emissions trading scheme because there may be times when agriculture would have to pay for emissions in years when soil quality is poor, Dr Jones told the inquiry there was “no valid reason for the Australian agricultural sector to be a net emitter of CO2”.

    “By adopting regenerative soil-building practices, it is practical, possible and profitable for broadacre cropping and grazing enterprises to record net sequestration of carbon in the order of 25 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of product sold (after emissions accounted for),” she said.

    “Discussions on adapting to climate change are irrelevant unless they focus on rebuilding healthy topsoil.

    “There is an urgent need for a national strategy to assist Australian agricultural industries to adapt to climate change. To be effective, this strategy will require a radical departure from ‘business as usual’.”

    But Dr Jones said in the last decade the key people working to develop soil building strategies have been declined funding from research and development corporations due to ‘expert scientific advice’ that it is not possible to build stable soil carbon.

    She said while farmers have data of the effectiveness of the work they’re doing, it is not considered data by scientists because it does not fit into the scientific model.

    “The scientific establishment had been talking among themselves while farmers across Australia were doing amazing innovative stuff,” she said.

    “We need a large investment to get the soil carbon accounting models right.”

    She said improved resilience from building better soils would reduce the need for drought assistance.

    “Improved agricultural productivity and profitability would translate to reduced requirements for government assistance.

    “Furthermore, farming in a perennial base would enhance the resilience of the agricultural landscape to a wide range of climatic extremes, some of which may not even have been encountered to date.”

  • World Bank blames biofuels for food prices

    “It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.

    The news comes at a critical point in the world’s negotiations on biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium on the use of plant-derived fuels.

    It will also put pressure on the British government, which is due to release its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher Report. The Guardian has previously reported that the British study will state that plant fuels have played a “significant” part in pushing up food prices to record levels. Although it was expected last week, the report has still not been released.

    “Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises,” said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. “It is imperative that we have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough to eat.”

    Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as “the first real economic crisis of globalisation”.

    President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: “Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases.”

    Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.

    Since April, all petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include 2.5% from biofuels. The EU has been considering raising that target to 10% by 2020, but is faced with mounting evidence that that will only push food prices higher.

    “Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate,” says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

    It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

    Other reviews of the food crisis looked at it over a much longer period, or have not linked these three factors, and so arrived at smaller estimates of the impact from biofuels. But the report author, Don Mitchell, is a senior economist at the Bank and has done a detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices, which allows much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food supply.

    The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact.

    Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US production of ethanol from plants.

    “It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices,” said Dr David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, last night. “All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change.”

  • Poor farmland offers biofuel solution

    Elliot Campbell, Robert Genova and Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with David Lobell of Stanford University, estimated the global extent of abandoned crop and pastureland and calculated their potential for sustainable bioenergy production from historical land-use data, satellite imaging and ecosystem models. Agricultural areas that have been converted to urban areas or have reverted to forests were not included in the assessment. 

    The researchers estimate that globally up to 4.7 million square kilometers (approximately 1.8 million square miles) of abandoned lands could be available for growing energy crops. The potential yield of this land area, equivalent to nearly half the land area of the United States (including Alaska), depends on local soils and climate, as well as on the specific energy crops and cultivation methods in each region. But the researchers estimate that the worldwide harvestable dry biomass could amount to as much as 2.1 billion tons, with a total energy content of about 41 exajoules. While this is a significant amount of energy (one exajoule is a billion billion joules, equivalent to about 170 million barrels of oil), at best it would satisfy only about 8% of worldwide energy demand.

    “At the national scale, the bioenergy potential is largest in the United States, Brazil and Australia,” says lead author Campbell. “These countries have the most extensive areas of abandoned crop and pasture lands. Eastern North America has the largest area of abandoned croplands, and the Midwest has the biggest expanse of abandoned pastureland. Even so, if 100% of these lands were used for bioenergy, they would still only yield enough for about 6% of our national energy needs.”

    The study revealed larger opportunities in other parts of the world. In some African countries, where grassland ecosystems are very productive and current fossil fuel demand is low, biomass could provide up to 37 times the energy currently used.

    “Our study shows that there is clearly a potential for developing sustainable bioenergy, and we’ve been able to identify areas where biomass can be grown for energy, without endangering food security or making climate change worse,” says Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology. “But we can’t count on bioenergy to be a dominant contributor to the global energy system over the next few decades. Expanding beyond its sustainable limits would threaten food security and have serious environmental impacts.”

    This research was funded by the Carnegie Institution and by the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University.

  • Energy emissions boom while farmers pay the cost

    From The Stock Rournal 
    A new government report released this week proves it is only thanks to bans on land clearing that Australia will meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol while the energy, transport and industrial sectors have recorded mammoth increases in their emissions since 1990.

    Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, this week released an inventory of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions between 1990 and 2006 which shows without those changes to land use, the Kyoto target would have been considerably overshot.

    The report shows emissions from the agriculture sector increased by 3.8pc between 1990 and 2006, and lists the farm sector as the third biggest emitter after the combined energy sector and industrial processes.

    Emissions from the energy sector had increased by 40pc in those 16 years, according to the report, while industrial emissions were up by 17pc.

    But it’s the land use emissions which have been slashed in by more than half, down 53.9pc since 1990 and due largely to State restrictions on land clearing, Senator Wong said.

    “It is the case that land use has been a significant factor in reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions,” Senator Wong said.

    “The fact we have had land clearing regulations introduced and effected at State levels has had substantial benefit in terms of Australia’s emissions profile.

    “But it is the case that aspect of abatement, that aspect of a reduction in emissions, is going to be less available to us in the future, that’s why we have to be aware we have work to do as a nation to reduce our emissions into the future.”

    Agriculture accounts for about 15.6pc of net national emissions, and the ag sector is the dominant source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions, according to the report.

    Livestock emissions were 69.7pc of the sector’s emissions in 2006 and 10.9pc of national emissions, despite declining by 4.7pc during the report period.

    Emissions from rice cultivation, agricultural soils, prescribed burns and burning of agricultural residues contribute to the rest of the agricultural emissions.

    With the Government’s proposed carbon emissions trading scheme a hot topic in Canberra this week, Senator Wong said the report confirmed the need for action on emissions, despite claims a scheme which included big emitters like transport could push up petrol prices by as much as 50 per cent.

    Economist, Professor Ross Garnaut, will release a draft report on an emissions trading scheme for Australia at the end of next week, and later in July the Government will release a green paper outlining options for the scheme, which it wants up and running by 2010.

    “While still on track to meet our Kyoto target, it’s clear we have a lot to do when it comes to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” Senator Wong said.

    “We know climate change is happening. The economically responsible thing to do with it is to introduce a climate emissions scheme.”

    She said decisions regarding coverage and what sectors are in and out of the scheme would be made in coming months.

    “We understand as a government this is a complex, economic reform. It is a necessary economic reform.

    “Climate change is happening, we need to deal with it…and the most responsible way of dealing with it is by introducing a sensible crafted emissions trading scheme.

    Senator Wong said she and Minister for Agriculture, Tony Burke, have had several discussions with farm sector leaders about their inclusion in or exclusion from the scheme.

    “There are complex issues associated with agriculture and we will continue to consult with them,” Senator Wong said.