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| Soil and water management; carrying on as we are currently, is not an option |
So, with the bang of a gavel last Saturday evening,
representatives of 195 nations reached a landmark accord that will, for the
first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse
gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change. This
is of course very encouraging news, however, only time will tell if collectively,
humanity can deliver on this agreement.
Climate change is of course caused by a host of different
reasons and is intricately linked to the way we manage and use the resources
that the world offers us. If you just look at two such resources, soil and
water, you can see that we need to change our ways big-time and rapidly.
A new report on soils published this month by the
Sustainable Food Trust, is to put it bluntly, alarming. I have taken some
extracts for you to read:
“Soil is a vital resource for the future of humanity. It
needs to be protected and enhanced. Instead, more than half (52%) of all
fertile, food-producing soils globally are now classified as degraded, many of
them severely degraded (UNCCD 2015).
Throughout human history, at least twelve past civilisations
have flowered on fertile soils and made huge advances, such as the development
of written language, mathematics and financial systems, only to disappear over
time as their soils progressively degraded and could no longer feed their
populations.
These civilisations occupied, or depended on, defined
geographical regions: the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire’s
exploitation of the once highly fertile soils of north Africa, parts of ancient
Greece, China, Central America, India and elsewhere. The damage done to soils
in these regions is still present today, but new civilisations were able to
spring up elsewhere, converting forests and native grasslands to agriculture
and thriving on the fertility that had built up over thousands of years in the
soil.
Today, however, due to the global trade in food, the global
adoption of exploitative farming methods and the extent to which forests and
natural grasslands have already been converted to crop production, it is the
entire global civilisation that is threatened by progressive soil degradation.
Research by the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative in
2015 calculated that soil degradation is costing between $6.3 and $10.6 trillion
dollars per year globally, but these costs could be reduced by enhancing soil
carbon stocks and adopting more sustainable farming methods.
A research group at Cranfield University estimated that in
England and Wales soil degradation costs £1.33 billion annually. Half of this
cost relates to loss of soil organic carbon (SOC), and the intensity of farming
is a major cause of soil carbon loss.
Agriculture and the food we eat depend on soil. Under
appropriate management soils are an infinitely renewable resource, while under
inappropriate management they are effectively a very finite resource. Under natural conditions it can take 500 - 1,000 years to
form an inch of soil from parent rock”. (I have highlighted this).
Here are a few statistics to ram the message home – if it
really needs to be, any longer, that is. Recent estimates indicate that every
year:
Soil degradation affects 1.9 billion hectares
12 million hectares (23 hectares a minute) of land is lost
to food production
24 billion tonnes of fertile soil is irretrievably washed or
blown away (3.4 tonnes for every human on the planet).
If you would like to read more from this report, go to:
Meanwhile, perhaps the most important world resource of all,
water, is also causing major concerns.
Across the globe, reports reveal huge areas in crisis today
as reservoirs and aquifers dry up. More than a billion individuals – one in
seven people on the planet – now lack access to safe drinking water. The world
faces a water crisis that will touch every part of the globe, a point that has
been stressed by Jean Chrétien, former Canadian prime minister and co-chair of
the InterAction Council. “The future political impact of water scarcity may be
devastating,” he said. “Using water the way we have in the past simply will not
sustain humanity in future.”
With expected increases in population, by 2030, food demand
is predicted to increase by 50% (70% by 2050) (Bruinsma, 2009), while energy
demand from hydropower and other renewable energy resources will rise by 60%
(WWAP, 2009). These issues are interconnected – increasing agricultural output,
for example, will substantially increase both water and energy consumption,
leading to increased competition for water between water-using sectors.
The world runs on water. Clean, reliable water supplies are
vital for industry, agriculture, and energy production. Every community and
ecosystem on Earth depends on water for sanitation, hygiene, and daily
survival.
Yet, around 700 million people in 43 countries
suffer today from water scarcity.
By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in
countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the
world's population could be living under water stressed conditions. With the
existing climate change scenario, almost half the world's population will
be living in areas of high water stress by 2030, including between 75 million
and 250 million people in Africa. In addition, water scarcity in some arid and
semi-arid places will displace between 24 million and 700 million people.
So you can see that although the Paris agreement is all
about “climate change” – if you lift off the lid and look in, it is in fact
about so, so, much more. I have just highlighted two elements here. Let us all hope that it truly marks a monumental turning
point in the way we treat the world’s resources, otherwise, the future really
does not bear thinking about.
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