A Harvest of Heat:Agribusiness andClimate Change
How Six Food Industry Giants Are Warming the Planet
Agriculture’s critical dependence on fossil fuels and the clearing of forests, grasslands and prairies for farming are the top two factors responsible for today’s massive global increases in CO2.
http://www.ifg.org/pdf/AgriBiz&Climate4-8.pdf
World Watch Institute’s report on Innovations in Sustainable Agriculture: Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production
by
Laura Reynolds and Danielle Nierenberg
http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/188%20climate%20and%20ag_FINAL.pdf
Partitioning of CH4 and CO2 production originating from rice straw, soil and root organic carbon in rice microcosms
Author(s): Quan Yuan, Judith Pump, Ralf Conrad
Source: PLoS ONE | November 5, 2012
Flooded rice fields are an important source of the greenhouse gas CH4. Possible carbon sources for CH4 and CO2 production in rice fields are soil organic matter (SOM), root organic carbon (ROC) and rice straw (RS), but partitioning of the flux between the different carbon sources is difficult. We conducted greenhouse experiments using soil microcosms planted with rice.
Study team: Ramanjaneyulu, Chandrashekar
Indian agriculture ails today. As against a 7- 8% growth rate of economy in the last few years, agriculture and allied sectors in the last decade and half have registered a much lower growth trajectory and face stagnation. With per capita food availability at a low point and land alienation at a high point, the magnitude of food insecurity manifests itself in varied ways to multiply distress for our poor and excluded people.
The current study is a small beginning for ActionAid India to understand the climate and agriculture from the perspective of small and marginal farmers. The study was conducted in three drought-prone regions of India- Anantapur of Andhra Pradesh, Balangir of Odisha and Bundelkhand regions of Uttar Pradesh.
Field researchers, using participatory methodologies, interviewed 1000 marginal and small farmers, spent time understanding their perspectives and have then compiled the major findings from the field.
This study has attempted a possible adaptation framework for climate change vis-à-vis agriculture.
Climate Change and Indian Agriculture – Implications & Way Forward
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NEW DELHI: More farmers are using weather insurance to mitigate risks from climate change. Top two weather insurers — Agricultural Insurance Corporation (AIC) and ICICI Lombard – say business is growing at 25% annually and now covers more than 200 districts across 21 states.
“The growth has been so spectacular over the past five years that as many as 12 million farmers, growing crops on over 15 million hectares of cropped area, might have been insured during the 2011-12 crop year,” said KN Rao, deputy general manager, AIC, which enjoys over 75% market share in this insurance category.
While the state-owned AIC covers almost all the designated districts, its nearest competitor ICICI Lombard is present in 11 states, covering over 50 districts. According to Union agriculture ministry, five insurance companies including AIC, ICICI Lombard, Iffco-Tokio and Cholamandlam MS offer insurance to farmers based on monsoon data.
“Uncertainty over monsoon and frequent climate changes have made it necessary for farmers to go for weather-based insurance. This provides them the much-needed cover and helps them withstand financial stress, which may happen due to crop loss,” said RS Sharma, senior agri-scientist, Agricultural Policy Research Institute.
Weather insurance was formally introduced in 2003 as a pilot, and by 2007 the government adopted it as an alternative to the existing yield index insurance. Around 40 crops are insured under the category for various climatic phenomena like deficit rainfall, dry-spell, excess rainfall, low temperature, high temperature, high humidity, and high wind.
The premium rates are capped for the cultivator and the premium (rates) beyond the cap are shared by the Centre and concerned state government on 50:50 basis.
“The premium rates for farmers depend on various crops. For wheat, it is capped at 1.5% while for other food crops, it is 2.0%,” said an AIC official.
With the rising popularity of weather-based insurance, the premium business as well as beneficiaries has also gone up over the past few years.
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“In the 2010-11 crop year, premium collection was around Rs 1,300 crore while the claim was around Rs 635 crore, benefitting 43.29 lakh farmers. In 2011-12, the premium collection went up to around Rs 1,850 crore while the claims and beneficiaries increased to Rs 887 crore and 46 lakh farmers, respectively,” said an AIC official.
However, weather insurance has its own challenges while catering to over 25-crore farmers in the country.
“One of the key challenges in weather index insurance has been establishing an adequate network of weather stations to service weather insurance as a credible insurance programme. It is estimated that the country needs around 8,000 automatic weather stations and about 32,000 rain gauges to effectively service the index insurance compared to the current network of 5,000,” added Rao.
http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/news/press_releases/2012/monsoon_climate_change.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1495.html
T.V. Padma
4 July 2012 | EN
Monsoon changes due to global warming still difficult to decipher, says a review
Flickr/fbloeink
[NEW DELHI] Understanding how the South Asian monsoon will change in response to global warming and resolving the uncertainties in projected changes are ‘demanding tasks’ for climate science, a review says.
Current state-of-the-art general circulation models have difficulty simulating the regional distribution of monsoon rainfall, the 24 June review in Nature Climate Change says.
The vagaries of the monsoon on short- and long-term timescales impact the lives of more than a billion people in South Asia who depend on rainfall for agriculture, power generation, industrial development and basic human needs.
Authors, Andrew Turner, National Centre for Atmospheric Science-Climate, University of Reading, and Harisubramaniam Annamalai, International Pacific Research Centre, School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Hawaii, say variations in the amount of monsoon rains in different years are low (10 per cent of the total summer rainfall).
But, variations within each season, over timescales of a few days or weeks, often have large impacts on agriculture or water supply.
“Perhaps the single biggest scientific challenge is in understanding monsoon variability at intra-seasonal timescales (several weeks), the so-called active and break events in the monsoon, and how they will change in the future,” Turner told SciDev.Net.
They “are poorly understood and difficult to predict,” he said.
The review also describes observed changes to monsoon rainfall over the second half of the 20th century such as an unprecedented rise in greenhouse gases and aerosols (tiny suspended particles in the air, such as sulphates from industry or soot from cook stoves).
Models linking monsoon responses to global warming suggest a rise in monsoon rainfall, but there is a high degree of uncertainty in these projections. Observations from data sets from most areas indicate a declining trend or no change in monsoons, contrary to the projected rise.
Turner explained that there could be reasons for the mismatch between observed and projected monsoon rainfall trends.
Increases in aerosols from pollution since the 1950s may be absorbing the sun’s radiation reaching the earth, impacting temperature differences over land and sea and, in turn, the monsoon.
Other possible factors include the effects of land-use change (the impact of the green revolution and massive expansion in irrigation in northern India, for example), or natural decadal variations in the rainfall, he said.
The review also highlights the need for reprocessing data, consistent data sets and a better understanding of the physics and complex dynamics behind monsoon circulation.
Co-author Annamalai told SciDev.Net that “as far as the Indian monsoon rainfall data goes, it is mostly about data processing techniques.”
When data from observing stations is projected or mapped into regular latitude and longitude grid points, different research groups employ different techniques, he explained.
“It is unclear how many ‘true observed station rainfall data’ go into each and every grid,” Annamalai said.
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| Green prophet Praful Bidwai Photo: Shailendra Pandey |
He does underline energy efficiency in a whole range of applications, and devotes a chapter to the recent flowering of renewable energy in many countries, but he is no technophile. Combating climate change is for him “in the last analysis… about transforming the existing relations of power”. He also mounts a multifaceted critique of India’s changing climate stance, its linkages with our foreign policy and big power ambitions, our energy policies, and offers informed, detailed alternatives. By doing so, he has initiated a third approach, in the Indian context. On the other hand, while he does discuss capitalism’s recent neoliberal avatar and its connections with climate change, and transborder production and globalisation, the book ignores capitalism’s essential logic, which is one of growth, accumulation, profits and the drive to avail of the cheapest input costs, particularly labour and raw material. In the former lies the book’s strengths; in the latter, its main, significant weakness.
The book offers a four-pronged critique of dominant approaches to climate issues: one, of “limited” per capita notions of equity favoured by the Indian government; the alternatives it discusses include, importantly, equity within nations, something that some non-governmental actors also miss out. Two, of reliance on the market. Three, the crafting of India’s climate policy and negotiations as completely elitist and non-participatory, a criticism that also holds for the formulation of climate action plans currently underway in many states. And four, a critique of many of the eight missions of the National Action Plan on Climate Change.
He proffers, in its stead, energy planning models that are decentralised, flexible and ecologically sound. Practical alternatives are presented — more public transport, water-saving measures such as the system of rice intensification, the varied uses of biomass — and, at another level, the potential offered by the remarkable rise of new renewable energy over the past 10 years, particularly wind and solar photovoltaic. He also discusses six categories of alt ernative proposals regarding climate negotiations, of which the most interesting, he suggests rightly, is the Greenhouse Development Rights framework for it imposes obligations on the rich regardless of their nationality. But how some of the visions he discusses will see light of day — particularly in the absence of adequate popular pressure in the four largest emitting countries, China, the US, Russia and India — is moot, a dilemma he’s alive to. Given the urgency of global warming, what is feasible and how quickly we can turn things around — considering the inherent logic of capitalism and its intensification worldwide — is one that he chooses to ignore.
Notwithstanding that, this is a superb book. Bidwai brings lucidity, breadth of knowledge and scholarship to a wide range of issues, some of which include positions mirrored by activist organisations in India: the myth that nuclear power is a panacea for climate change; the many dangers of market mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism; that much of what the Indian government claims as adaptation is merely a repackaging of existing programmes; the hazardous advocacy of large dams and river-linking within the National Water Mission; the need for a more decentralised generation and use of energy, particularly in villages that have no electricity, etc. This book is essential reading for a wide audience even beyond those engaged with climate change. For it to reach them, a cheaper paperback edition would be handy.
Adve is a Delhi-based activist
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| The Politics Of Climate Change And The Global Crisis: Mortgaging Our Future Praful Bidwai Orient BlackSwan 392 pp; Rs 750 |
భూవాతావరణంలో వస్తున్న పెనుమార్పుల ప్రభా వం మనకు నిత్యమూ అనుభవంలోకి వస్తూనే ఉంది. వ్యవసాయం ప్రధానంగా వాతావరణంపై ఆధారపడి సాగే ఉత్పత్తి కార్యకలాపం. నిజానికి వాతావరణంలోని మార్పులు, వ్యవసాయం పరస్పరం ప్రభావాన్ని నెరపుతుంటాయి. వాతావరణంలోని మార్పు ల ప్రభావాన్ని తక్కువగా అంచనావేయడం తరచుగా జరుగుతోంది. అలాగే వాతావరణంపై వ్యవసాయం కలుగజేస్తున్న మార్పులను కూడా చిన్నచూపు చూస్తు న్నాం. అందువల్లనే సాధారణంగా వాతావరణ మార్పులకు అనుగుణమైన వ్యవసాయ పద్ధతులు, సాంకేతిక పరిజ్ఞానం చుట్టూనే చర్చలు సాగుతుం టాయి. నిజంగానే వాతావరణ మార్పులకు అనువైన సేద్య పద్ధతులను రూపొందించాలన్నా, అమలు చేయాలన్నా ముందుగా వ్యవసాయం, వాతావరణాల మధ్య పరస్పర ప్రభావ సంబంధాలను సమగ్రంగా అర్థం చేసుకోవడం అవసరం. భారత రైతాంగం ఇప్పటికే అనుభవిస్తున్న జీవావరణ, ఆర్థిక, సామాజిక రాజకీయ సంక్షోభపు విశాల నేపథ్యం నుంచి వాటిని అవగాహన చేసుకోవడం అంతకంటే అవసరం.
