How to Tackle Climate Change, Food Security and Land Degradation

(North America Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance News) Some lesser-known options, such as integrated water management and increasing the organic content of soil, have fewer trade-offs than many well-known options, such as planting trees, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Global Change Biology.

"We argue that if we want to have an impact on multiple problems, we need to be smart about what options get us multiple benefits and which options come with potential trade-offs," said lead author Pamela McElwee, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "We found that many of the better-known solutions to climate mitigation and land degradation come with a lot of potentially significant trade-offs."

The idea of planting trees in vast areas to remove carbon dioxide from the air and reduce the impact of climate change, for example, has attracted a lot of attention, with some claiming it's the best "low-hanging fruit" approach to pursue, McElwee said. But large-scale tree planting could conflict directly with food security because both compete for available land. It could also diminish biodiversity, if fast-growing exotic trees replace native habitat.

Some potential options that don't get as much attention globally, but are quite promising with fewer trade-offs, include integrated water management, reducing post-harvest losses in agriculture, improving fire management, agroforestry (integrating trees and shrubs with croplands and pastures) and investing in disaster risk management, she said.

The study examined possible synergies and trade-offs with environmental and development goals. It was based on a massive literature review - essentially 1,400 individual literature reviews - conducted by scientists at many institutions.

They compared 40 options to tackle the interrelated problems of climate change, food security and land degradation and looked for trade-offs or co-benefits with 18 categories of services provided by ecosystems, such as clean air and clean water, and the United Nations' 17 sustainable development goals.

Excerpt from Washington Post: As part of photosynthesis, plants pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their stems, leaves and roots. Unlike trees, grasslands store most of their carbon underground, in their roots and the soil.

And that makes them more reliable “carbon sinks” than forests, according to a 2018 University of California at Davis study. Because carbon is stored in the soil, it is not released back into the atmosphere when grasslands burn, as it is when trees go up in flames.

“It’s a good locker to put the carbon into,” said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer and Rice University professor. “Carbon will stay in the soil for centuries."

To create incentives for landowners to preserve natural land, Blackburn and the Baker Institute at Rice are leading a group of organizations as varied as the Nature Conservancy and Valero Energy to brainstorm ways to create a market for storing carbon in the soil of prairies, farms, ranches and grasslands in Texas and around the country.

Funding is available to landowners for carbon stored in forests, such as California’s cap-and-trade market, and the same should be done for soil, Blackburn said.

It was hard to identify anyone who would pay landowners to mitigate flood damage, Blackburn said. But carbon storage is another matter, particularly for oil and gas companies looking for ways to offset the carbon dioxide that they emit.

All native grasslands in the country together could sequester up to 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, Blackburn estimates. The nation’s annual carbon dioxide output was nearly 7 billion metric tons in 2018, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The group led by Blackburn and the Baker Institute is working on a blueprint for a nationwide program to pay for carbon storage in soil. Landowners who enter such a program would agree to a 10-year commitment. If the land is sold, the commitment restarts.

Precision may be the key. With strip tillage, which means plowing only where a seed is placed, about 50 percent of the land is left undisturbed, Collins said. Targeting fertilizer to where it’s needed, as opposed to spraying it across a field, can also increase the amount of carbon in the soil.

A payment system for carbon storage would be welcomed even by landowners who recognize the value of undisturbed soil. Keeping land wild costs money, whether it’s through actual upkeep or because of an opportunity lost.

Every year, 2 million acres of farmland are lost to development in the United States, according to the Texas Farm Bureau.