UN Says We Need To Change Our Relationship With Land
July was the hottest month ever recorded in Earth's history - the latest troubling data point in the world's climate crisis.
According to a new report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), our food system is a major yet under-examined contributor to climate change. And ironically, the more that system fuels planet-wide warming, the harder it will become to adequately feed ourselves.
Agriculture, forestry, and other types of land use account for 23% of human greenhouse-gas emissions.
The food system overall - including farming and grazing, transportation, packaging, and feed production - produces 37% of greenhouse-gas emissions, the report found.
changing the way we use land is important as well, the report said, because those shifts offer us a way to suck carbon dioxide back out of the air (unlike reducing the burning of fossil fuels, which would cut emissions but not undo any of the damage we've already created).
Changing the way we farm, leaving forests standing, and reducing food waste could reduce emissions, capture carbon, and increase global food security, the report's authors said.
Alarmingly, the air temperature over land is rising twice as fast as the global average, the IPCC scientists found. It has already risen more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
When it comes to agriculture's contribution to this warming, soil management accounts for almost half of US agricultural emissions. Fertilizer enriched with livestock manure and nitrogen releases nitrous oxide and methane, two potent greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere. (Methane is about 25 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.) Cows also produce methane through their digestive processes, and rice cultivation emits the gas as well.
What's more, tilling practices also encourage erosion, deplete nutrients, and release the gases stored inside the soil.
Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also reduces the nutritional quality of crops, decreasing the concentrations of protein, zinc, and iron in grains like wheat.
Combined, the report suggests, these challenges could lead the prices of grains like wheat and rice to jump by 23% by 2050.
That's a dire threat for the 821 million people who are already undernourished worldwide.
The IPCC report found that human use now directly impacts more than 70% of Earth's ice-free land.
