Former and current FAO officials and academics have criticised the document, seen by Climate Home News, for pro-industry bias, cherry-picking data and even “disinformation” about the environmental impacts of animal farming. 

The FAO told Climate Home that a final version of the report – part of an assessment consisting of various documents – would be launched in 2025 and that conclusions should not be drawn from the draft text at this stage. 

Estimates of livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions vary, ranging from 12%-20% of the global total – mostly in the form of methane from ruminants like cows and sheep, and carbon dioxide (CO2) released when forests are cut down for pasture.  

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Methane, which is emitted in cow burps and manure, is a short-lived greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years, making it one of the few available levers to prevent climate tipping points being reached in the near term.   

In a 2024 survey of more than 200 scientists and sustainable agriculture experts, about 78% said livestock numbers should peak globally by 2025 to start bringing down emissions and help keep global warming to internationally agreed limits.   

But the FAO’s draft study offers strong support for growth of the sector, saying livestock’s contributions to food security, nutrition and raw materials for industry make it a “linchpin for human well-being and economic development”.  

It is also described as “critical” for food security, “crucial” for global economies, and “indispensable” for development in sub-Saharan Africa.  

World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions

The report will be submitted to the FAO’s agriculture committee, which has 130 member nations, although the text could change as national representatives thrash out a final version. 

Private-sector lobbyists participating as advisors in national delegations are sometimes also able to influence texts under discussion, according to a July report by the Changing Markets Foundation. 

One FAO insider, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home the draft FAO report had been “biased towards pushing livestock [with] many national interests behind it”.   

The FAO receives around a third of its budget in direct donations from member countries, and the rest in voluntary contributions from the same states and other actors, including businesses and trade associations.   

Tech fixes  

The 491-page draft report, which was overseen by a scientific advisory committee of 23 experts and peer reviewers, does not assess how diets with more plant protein could improve food security.   

One advisory committee member, Professor Frederic Leroy of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told Climate Home a shift to entirely plant-based diets “would severely compromise the potential for food security worldwide because many of the food nutrients which are already limited in global diets are found in livestock. How much you can move (away from livestock) should be the real investigation.” 

This table from a World Bank report (Recipe for a Livable Planet), published in May 2024, shows that vegan diets are the lowest in emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

The report’s analysis assumes rising meat production as demand surges among a growing world population with higher incomes. In this context, it proposes “expanding the (livestock) herd size”, increasing production through intensified systems, better use of genetic techniques, and improved land management.   

“Technological innovations” such as feed additives and supplements to suppress methane are another idea backed by the FAO. Those could include experimental methods such as a vaccine announced last week and funded by a $9-million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund that aims to reduce the number and activity of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach.    

Herdsman Musa takes cattle to graze along the Dodowa-Somenya road in Ghana, April 12, 2024. According to environmentalist Kwame Ansah, ‘The unchecked grazing is not only destroying crops but also eroding soil fertility exacerbating land degradation.’ (Photo: Matrix Images/Christian Thompson/via Reuters)

The report’s findings, once approved, will be fed into a three-part roadmap for bringing agricultural emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  

The first instalment, published at the COP28 climate summit, was viewed internally by some FAO experts as a generic placeholder which largely followed an industry-friendly agenda.    

One ex-FAO official, who requested anonymity, told Climate Home the latest draft report on livestock ploughs a similar furrow and would set expectations for part two of the 1.5C roadmap.   

“The reality is that if they do a (nearly) 500-page report and put 23 experts’ names in front of it, it’s to impress you and say: ‘This is what is going to happen. We’re going to defend the sector’,” the former UN official said.  

Making the case for meat 

The expert added that the study’s panel was skewed toward intensified livestock systems and had “cherry picked” evidence to justify recommendations pointing in that direction.  

Several of the report’s advisory committee members have previously advocated for meat-based diets, and 11 of the study’s contributors work for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), including one of the paper’s committee advisors.

According to the ex-FAO official, ILRI “has been pushing intensified livestock all its life. It’s their identity. It’s what they do.”

The institute co-founded an agribusiness-backed initiative – Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) – which de-emphasised livestock emissions, framing them as just one of several problems for the industry to tackle.

ILRI did not respond to a request for comment.

IPCC’s input into key UN climate review at risk as countries clash over timeline

Shelby C. McClelland, of New York University’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, told Climate Home she was shocked by a repeated claim in the draft FAO report of “a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the contribution of livestock to global greenhouse gas emissions”.  

“This downplays and outright ignores overwhelming scientific evidence from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], high-profile papers, and other recent studies,” McClelland said. “A statement like this in a supposedly scientific and evidenced-based review by the UN FAO is alarming given their influence on agenda-setting for global climate action.”

Advisory committee member Leroy countered that it was “dangerous” to talk about a scientific consensus when the metrics used to measure methane compared to other greenhouse gases are constantly evolving.  

“This should be part of an open and transparent debate,” he added. “I don’t think we have reached consensus on the way we interpret the effects of livestock agriculture on climate change, the degree of it, how we can measure it and how we can deal with it.” 

Scientists at the FAO first alerted the world to the meat industry’s climate footprint when they attributed 18% of global emissions to livestock farming in the seminal 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow. This analysis found that, far from enhancing food security, “livestock actually detract more from total food supply than they provide.”  

However, the paper sparked a backlash felt by key experts in the agency’s Rome headquarters, as the FAO hierarchy, industry lobbyists and state donors to its biannual $1-billion budget exerted pressure for a change of direction.      

By the time of last December’s COP28, the FAO’s stance had shifted so far that two experts cited in another livestock emissions study called publicly for its retraction. They argued it had distorted their work and underestimated the emissions reduction potential from farming less livestock by a factor of between 6 and 40. 

A deforested and burnt area is seen in an indigenous area used as cattle pasture in Areoes, Mato Grosso state, Brazil, September 4, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Landau)

No ‘carte blanche’ 

Guy Pe’er, a conservation ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, accused the FAO of turning a blind eye to widespread “hyper-intensive grazing practices” and land use change caused by the world’s growing number of mega-farms.

“We’re currently using more land to feed livestock than humans, and that is causing rapid deforestation in Brazil. Ignoring that is outrageous. When an official organisation is producing disinformation like this, I find it extremely irresponsible,” he said.  

Leroy told Climate Home that different types of livestock farming should not be conflated. “If you have over-grazing and the pollution of water sources, that’s clearly wrong, but other types of animal agriculture are also net-positive [for the environment],” he said.  

If the advisory committee “sees advantages in having livestock agriculture as part of the food system, I think there’s a sound scientific basis to assume that,” he added. “It doesn’t mean that it’s carte blanche or ‘anything goes’ at all.” 

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

The post FAO draft report backs growth of livestock industry despite emissions  appeared first on Climate Home News.

The regulation, which tasks the EU’s 27 member states with reviving their land and water habitats and planting billions of trees, was narrowly passed by EU environment ministers.

The controversial law only gained enough backing because Austria’s minister for climate action, Leonore Gewessler, defied her country’s leader and voted in favour of it, a decision which may be challenged legally. 

But, while celebrating the bill’s approval, climate campaigners and scientists warned that its ambition had been diluted and it must be implemented effectively to reverse the destruction of Europe’s natural carbon sinks.

EU warns “delaying tactics” have made plastic treaty deal “very difficult”

The law requires each EU country to rejuvenate 20% of their degraded land and water habitats by 2030 and all of them by 2050, and to plant three billion more trees across the bloc by 2030.

It also requires countries to restore 30% of their drained peatlands by 2030 and 50% by mid-century.

Peatlands that have been drained, largely for farming, forestry and peat extraction, are responsible for 5% of Europe’s total greenhouse gas emissions. 

Climate breakthrough

Belgium’s climate minister Zakia Khatattabi told Climate Home that the law’s passing is “not only a breakthrough for nature but also for the climate”, and would enable the EU to meet its emissions-cutting targets.

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said that “without it, carbon neutrality in Europe would have been put beyond reach”.

The amount of carbon dioxide sucked in by Europe’s carbon sinks – including forests, peatlands, grassland, soil and oceans –  has been falling since 2010. For forests, the World Resources Institute blames logging for timber and biomass and more wildfires and pests for the decline.

The amount of carbon sucked in is shrinking (black line) when it needs to increase to meet targets for 2030 (orange dot) and 2050 (blue dot)

But the EU’s plan to meet its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 involves halting this decline and reversing it into a 15% increase on 2021 levels by 2030.

Jette Bredahl Jacobsen, vice-chair of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, told Climate Home the new nature law “can contribute substantially to this, as healthy ecosystems can store more carbon and are more resilient against climate change impacts”.

The law is extremely popular with the EU public, with 75% of people polled in six EU countries saying they agree with it and just 6% opposing.

Watered down

But farmer trade associations were fiercely against it, and it became a symbolic battleground between right-wing and populist parties on one side and defenders of the EU Green Deal on the other.

Several of the law’s strongest passages ended up diluted before it reached ministers for approval, including caveats added to an obligation for countries to prevent any “net loss” of urban green space and tree cover this decade.

A new clause was introduced to deter EU states from using funds from the Common Agricultural Policy or Common Fisheries Policy to finance nature restoration – raising questions as to where money to implement the law will come from.

And, most importantly, an obligation to restore peatlands that have been drained for farming – a major source of emissions – was weakened.

A peat bog under restoration in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, pictured in January 2022. (Photo: Imago Images/Rüdiger Wölk via Reuters)

The original regulation would have instructed countries to rewet 30% of peatlands drained for agricultural use by 2030 and 70% by 2050 – the most effective way of restoring them. 

But, as a concession to farmers, the final version of the nature law mandates rewetting just 7.5% of these peatlands by 2030 and 16.7% by 2050, with exceptions possible for actions such as replacing peatlands drained for agriculture with other uses.

Rewetting usually involves blocking drainage ditches. As well as reducing emissions, this helps an area adapt to climate change, protecting it from floods, and improving the water quality, soil and biodiversity.

But the Commission will also count other actions as peatland “restoration”, such as the partial raising of water tables, bans on the use of heavy machinery, tree removal, the reintroduction of peat-forming vegetation or fire prevention measures. 

That’s despite the European Commission’s own rulebook describing these measures as “supplementary to gain better results” and saying that “peatland restoration should always primarily focus on rewetting”.

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Where rewetting does take place, as with all restoration measures in the final version of the regulation, EU states will be obliged to prioritise action in particular areas known as Natura 2000 sites. These cover around 18% of the EU’s territory, and should already have been restored under existing legislation.  

Environmentalists maintain that the legislation still has tremendous potential, pointing to possible actions such as the restoration of seagrass meadows which cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor but absorb more than 10% of its carbon.    

EU countries will now draft national nature restoration plans over the next two years showing how they intend to meet their targets, for assessment by the Commission.

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post Despite dilution, officials say new nature law can restore EU carbon sinks appeared first on Climate Home News.

As this European Parliament term began, Fridays for Future school strikes, inspired by Greta Thunberg, were sweeping Europe, with young people demanding that political leaders act decisively against climate change’s mortal threat. 

Five years on, as the parliament entered its final chapter, very different protests erupted in Brussels and across Europe – this time led by farmers, who clashed with police and brought the city to gridlock. The farmers’ grievances were many, from rising energy and fertiliser costs, to cheap imports and environmental rules.  

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Just as Fridays for Future signified growing pressure on politicians to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, the farmers’ protests have been seen as a stark warning of the rural backlash against doing so. 

In reality, the reasons for the farmers’ anger are more diffuse.     

Climate and forests centre-stage 

In the early days of the current parliament, the school strikers’ message appeared to be getting through. Tackling climate change was  “this generation’s defining task”, the European Commission declared. Within 100 days of taking office, the new Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met her manifesto promise of launching the European Green Deal. 

The following few years saw climate and forests take centre-stage in EU policymaking to an unprecedented degree: from the Climate Law, which wrote into the statutes the EU’s goal to be climate neutral by 2050, to the Nature Restoration Law (NRL), setting binding targets to bring back nature across Europe, and the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), the first legislation of its kind in the world, which aims to stop EU consumption from devastating forests around the world. 

Then came the backlash. 

Despite exit, EU seeks to save green reforms to energy investment treaty

Over the past year, vested industry interests and EU member states have tried to sabotage key pieces of the European Green Deal, including the NRL and the EUDR. 

This pushback against laws to protect the natural world is now a battleground in EU parliamentary elections, with populist, far-right and centre-right parties seeing it as fertile vote-winning territory. 

The centre-right European People’s Party, the largest group in the European Parliament, has been campaigning against key planks of the Green Deal, including the NRL, while promoting itself as the defender of rural interests. 

But the views of the rural constituencies whose votes they covet are not as simplistic or polarised as widely depicted. 

Deep listening 

At Fern, we’ve increasingly worked with people who share the same forest policy goals but are bitterly opposed to one another.

This is why we commissioned the insight firm GlobeScan to run focus groups among rural communities in four highly forested countries: Czechia, France, Germany and Poland. We wanted to find out what those whose concerns have been used to justify the backlash against green laws really think. The results contradict the prevailing narrative. 

All participants – selected with a balance of genders, occupations, political views and socio-economic statuses – felt that forests should be protected by law, and unanimously rejected the idea that such protection measures are a threat to rural economic development or an assault on property rights.

They felt deeply attached to their forests, saw them as public goods, were concerned about the state of them, and had a strong sense of responsibility and ownership towards them. They also wanted to see action to improve industrial forest management practices and mitigate climate change. 

Climate, development and nature: three urgent priorities for next UK government

While there was some sympathy for concerns around too much bureaucracy, even those who expressed this view felt forests should be protected by laws. Moreover, they saw the EU as having a primary role in providing support and incentives, and developing initiatives to fight the climate and biodiversity crises.  

Given how much EU politicians have put rural concerns at the heart of their arguments for rolling back the Green Deal – and are now using them in their election campaigns – it’s telling that their narratives on this do not resonate widely. Even foresters with right-leaning political views saw most of them as extreme and oversimplified. 

The lesson here is that the simplistic, divisive arguments that dominate the public debate over rural people and laws to protect nature do not reflect the complex reality of peoples’ lives or their attitudes. Where a divide exists between those pushing for strong laws to protect nature and the rural communities supposedly resisting them, it’s far from irreconcilable. 

Bridging any such gaps by listening and understanding each other’s perspectives is vital for all our futures. Those elected to the next EU Parliament would be wise to heed this. 

For further information, see: Rural Perspectives on Forest Protection 

The post Right-wing pushback on EU’s green laws misjudges rural views  appeared first on Climate Home News.

When the Stade de France in Paris is filled to capacity, it holds 81,400 people. You would then need another 2,484 to reach the number of badge-wearing participants at last year’s UN COP28 climate change conference in Dubai. This illustrates the sheer size of what was the world’s most important climate-focused event in 2023. 

But it also begs the question, do these annual ‘mega-gatherings’ actually deliver anything? 

One thing is abundantly clear: despite almost three decades of COPs and ballooning attendance, our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and the world continues to warm. 

Process hijacking purpose  

My colleagues and I at Clim-Eat – the think-and-do-tank for food and climate that I founded in 2021 – recently published a paper examining the efficacy of COP summits, specifically in relation to food and agriculture. We found several failures. 

Firstly, negotiations on food and agriculture have moved at a snail’s pace over the past 17 years. In spite of numerous meetings, workshops, submissions and decisions, there has been literally no real-world impact as a result.  

Secondly, the trend of COP host countries – known as Presidencies – launching special initiatives on specific issues of interest has achieved little. These initiatives receive plenty of media attention when announced but amount to little more than virtue signalling. 

Rich nations meet $100bn climate finance goal – two years late

For example, at the launch of COP21’s 4p1000 Initiative, France’s then-Minister of Agriculture said it could reconcile aims of food security and the fight against climate change. Today, the initiative has yet to report anything on the positive climate action it sought to create.  

The same goes for Morocco’s COP22 initiative on Adaptation in African Agriculture. It no longer mentions its ambitious target of raising $30 billion to support farmers – presumably because it hasn’t been reached. There are plenty of other examples of special initiatives being quietly ushered out of the spotlight.  

Unwarranted optimism

Let’s remember that COP negotiations first recognised agriculture as the key to solving climate change in 2006. It then took six years to agree on the next steps. Then, only in 2022, 16 years after the initial point, did the negotiations agree that “socioeconomic and food security dimensions are critical when dealing with climate change in agriculture and food systems.” Sixteen years to build a sentence to combat a third of global emissions.  

This suggests there’s little reason to be optimistic about the Emirates Declaration on Food and Agriculture, a special initiative launched at last year’s COP28. Signed by 159 countries, it called for action to adapt food systems to climate change, but the summit’s official negotiations on food and agriculture failed to acknowledge the declaration or reflect its priorities. The declaration itself is a creative collection of various adjectives and adverbs, reaffirmations and goals to ‘strengthen’ commitments. And six months after its launch, it is not clear whether it has led to anything at all; placing faith in its outcomes is utterly fanciful. 

The path forward

This cycle of the UNFCCC and COP Presidencies applauding special initiatives in the short term without holding countries responsible in the long term has to stop. The hamster wheel of inaction continues to spin.  

But we can slow it down and perhaps get off the wheel altogether. To do this, my colleagues and I concluded that the UN needs to: 

• Reform the UNFCCC process to prioritise measurable results and impacts, shifting its role to that of a watchdog ensuring action from all actors rather than merely organising large, costly meetings. 
• Make COPs leaner and less frequent/hold them every other year, reducing participant numbers and focusing on productive meetings. 
• Increase transparency regarding the financial costs of COPs, participation and emissions, to hold the UN accountable. 

Implementing these recommendations will not be easy. It means changing entrenched ways and tackling entrenched interests. There will be push-back.  

But as the UN’s mid-year climate talks begin in Bonn this week, observe the promises made with little follow-through, the unwarranted yet celebratory atmosphere filling the air – largely destined to be forgotten. Notice that when the clapping has stopped, and the initiators are no longer in the spotlight, they will slink back into the shadows, waiting to resurface onto the next grand stage at COP29 in Azerbaijan.  

The post The great COP food systems illusion: UN climate talks deliver no real-world action appeared first on Climate Home News.

While scientists have long recognised that vegan and vegetarian diets are far better for the climate than typical Western meat-eating ones, governments and international bodies have often shied away from explicit calls for the public to consume fewer animal products.

Experts told Climate Home that diets are an emotive issue. Western politicians and lobbyists opposed to climate action have spread disinformation about green policies that affect food, falsely claiming that governments will limit hamburgers, tax T-bones or make citizens eat low-carbon forms of protein like insects.

Shift subsidies

The bank’s new “Recipe for a Livable Planet” report outlines a “menu of solutions” governments can take to reduce their planet-warming emissions from food production, including using more renewable energy, harvesting food from trees instead of cutting them down, and restoring forests.

It calls on high-income countries, whose diets are most polluting for the planet, to take the lead by providing finance for green measures to low and middle-income nations and by shifting subsidies away from high-emitting food sources like cattle for beef. This “would reveal their full price and help make low-emission food options cheaper in comparison”, the report says.

UN agrees carbon market safeguards to tackle green land grabs

Report author William Sutton, the bank’s lead on climate-smart agriculture, told Climate Home an example of a subsidy that is “not necessarily helpful for the environment” is providing free or cheap land for grazing livestock. While Sutton declined to single out countries, the US government, for example, allows cows to graze on public land for a knock-down price.

If subsidies for meat were reduced in line with its “true cost” to the planet, prices would be 20-60% higher, Sutton said. “Allow the price of meat to more accurately reflect its true cost and let consumers decide whether that’s what they want to consume or whether they would rather consume lower-emissions, lower-cost alternatives,” he added.

Options not prescriptions

Despite its report, the World Bank is not keen to be seen telling people what to eat or arguing for veganism. “The approach that we’ve taken is not to be prescriptive – not to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do – but to provide options on what they could do if they should so choose,” Sutton said.

The report contrasts high-emitting foods like red meat and dairy with “low-emission foods like poultry or fruits or vegetables”. While poultry meat, which is mainly chicken, is much less emissions-intensive than lamb or particularly beef, it is more polluting than plant-based proteins, as the report’s data shows.

This table from the report shows that vegan diets are the lowest emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

Sutton said that changing to a more sustainable diet “doesn’t mean eliminating meat necessarily. It could be switching from beef or lamb to something like chicken or even pork.” But, he added, people “could also switch to soy or other types of beans… That will reduce emissions even more but we don’t think it’s useful to prescribe that.”

Greenpeace EU food campaigner Sini Eräjää agreed that promoting full vegetarianism or veganism is too “black and white”. But, she added, encouraging poultry consumption gives out the wrong message. “I know that there are different kinds of calculations between different kinds of meats,” she said, but “first and foremost we need to change to more plant-based diets”.

Paul Behrens, an environmental change professor at Leiden University, agreed, telling Climate Home that chicken farms drive zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance and pollute rivers and air, while poultry feed causes deforestation.

The World Bank still has investments in the meat and dairy sector. Last year, its International Finance Corporation arm loaned $47.3m for a company to develop a pig-rearing complex in China and invested $32.6m in a Brazilian dairy producer, despite opposition from environmentalists.

Asked about this, Sutton said the organisation had to “walk the talk” and had increased its support for adapting farming to climate change and reducing its emissions.

But, he added, the bank does support some investments in livestock “after careful consideration”, if it thinks it can improve a company’s approach by increasing efficiency, cutting emissions, and providing jobs and nutritious food to the poor.

Political hot-potato

Other international bodies have avoided criticising meat too explicitly. Former officials of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have said their employers censored them when they tried to criticise livestock. Meanwhile scientists have accused the FAO of misusing their research to underplay the role that changing diets can play in cutting climate-heating emissions.

In 2021, scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faced pressure from Brazil and Argentina – two major beef and animal feed producers – to remove from a report a mention of plant-based diets and reduction of meat and dairy consumption as being good for the climate.

Edward Davey, an advisor to the Food and Land Use Coalition, said that national governments in particular “tend to be quite shy about talking about this issue because they fear the political repercussions of being perceived to be telling people what to eat”.

The US government has made no moves to reduce meat consumption but right-wing media outlets like Fox News have falsely claimed that “Biden’s climate requirements” will restrict Americans to “one burger per month”.

The Australian government likewise has no policies to curb meat-eating. But opposition politicians there have spread misinformation that the country signing up to a global methane pledge amounts to a “T-bone tax” and the end of the Australian barbeque.

We heard warnings about an end to the Aussie barbeque, a T-bone tax and so on if Australia joins 120 other countries in signing a pledge to reduce methane emissions.

But for rhetorical flourish – no one was ever going to outdo Barnaby Joyce.#Insiders #auspol pic.twitter.com/ZHYkbS0HJ2

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) October 15, 2022

Greenpeace EU’s Eräjää said she had seen early drafts of European Commission documents that included warnings about red meat’s health impact before those warnings were stripped out of the final version. “Meat is a four-letter word,” she said.

David Powell has researched the issue for Climate Outreach, a group that specialises in communicating effectively on climate change. He said that “what we see as normal to eat is closely linked with our identities and is very personal”.

“For most people, climate arguments alone won’t help persuade them to change what they eat,” he said, adding it is better to talk about the health benefits of eating less meat and dairy in a positive way rather than shaming people.

High-income countries eat more servings of animal-sourced products than the global average

Both Sutton and Davey stressed that the debate over meat-eating is largely a wealthy country concern. People in higher-income regions eat three times as many servings of meat, seafood, eggs and dairy per day than their counterparts in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa.

“Many, many people in the world – typically richer people in wealthier societies but also in unequal middle-income countries – need to eat much less meat for the purpose of their health, as well as for the climate, and many of the world’s poorer people need to eat more animal  protein for their health, well-being and nutrition,” said Davey.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.

Set against the global backdrop of poverty, hunger, climate change, debt and conflict, it can feel hard to be hopeful at present. But there is a real win-win opportunity – as well as a deep moral obligation – to heal geopolitical divisions, foster peace, alleviate poverty, ensure food and nutrition security, address the climate crisis, and deliver a better, fairer future for people and planet. It lies in the reforms of the global financial architecture necessary to deliver the additional sum of at least $3 trillion required to support countries to meet the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Last year’s international meetings in Paris and Nairobi – leading to the Paris Pact for People and Planet, and the Nairobi Declaration – have made the case for debt relief, enhanced international taxation and global financial architecture reform. These reforms will be centre-stage at next week’s Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington DC.

Here the world must urgently come together to articulate and deliver a clear plan for how to end hunger and build resilient food systems, backed by real leadership, enhanced coordination, accountability and finance. The task at hand is to connect the global imperative to act on food security, sustainable agriculture and malnutrition with the broader efforts underway to drive a reform agenda and to replenish the World Bank’s concessional lending arm, the International Development Association (IDA).

At UN climate talks in Dubai last year, 159 world leaders committed themselves to action on food security and climate change by signing the COP28 Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action – the first of its kind. The commitments in this declaration now need to be linked with the emerging global plan for increased finance.

Is water provision in drought-hit Zambia climate ‘loss and damage’ or adaptation?

African potential

Africa is ground zero for the climate crisis, but is also the continent where solutions will have the most impact. Of the 9.8 billion people expected to live on the planet by 2050, a quarter will be African. Financial reforms must unlock climate-positive green industrialization and transform food systems across the continent in a way that is compatible with sustainable and inclusive economic growth. But the ultimate test will be whether the funds released reach the communities who need them most, when they need them, producing the desired results of ending poverty, building climate-resilient infrastructure, saving nature and biodiversity from extinction, and delivering prosperous lives for all.

This goal is within our reach – with evidence and farmers’ testimonials showing the success of innovative models such as the Arcos community-led scheme in Rwanda, which has empowered smallholder farmers to preserve and restore forests and agricultural landscapes. To date, 12,000 community members have grown 4.2 million trees, including fruit trees for boosting income and nutrition, nitrogen-fixing species to improve soil health, fodder species for livestock and indigenous species for biodiversity, on more than 20,000 hectares. The farmers have also built terraces across the hilly landscapes to reduce soil erosion and prevent pollution of lakes and rivers.

Nigeria’s path to net zero should be fully lined with trees – and fairness

Across much of the Global South, there are numerous such inspiring examples of where communities and societies have established social safety nets, fostered rural development, and promoted gender and social equity. These approaches have enhanced  communities’ capacity to plan for and respond to more extreme weather, to continue to deliver their crops to market despite climate change and other challenges, and to provide nutritious food for their families.

Smallholder farmers produce a third of the world’s food, yet receive only 1.7 percent of climate finance. Globally, there must be a major shift in financial flows to change that, including efforts by international development partners such as the World Bank and the philanthropic sector. National government leadership is a prerequisite to success, including revising agricultural subsidy programs to ensure they incentivize farming practices and behaviour that will help the world close the hunger gap while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting biodiversity and restoring degraded lands.

Global momentum growing

This year there is a golden opportunity to make progress on financing for food systems. As a result of consistent advocacy – including from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Kenyan President William Ruto and World Bank President Ajay Banga – an additional $300–400 billion in low-cost concessional finance and lending has been promised over the next decade by the multilateral development banks (MDBs) to low- and lower-middle income countries.

This recalibration of the international finance institutions’ balance sheets is a welcome development to build on – and demonstrates that climate and development commitments can be honoured. The social, economic and environmental case for making these kinds of investments in food security is unequivocal. Well-designed investments deliver four-fold benefits: they strengthen food security and nutrition; reduce greenhouse gas emissions; support nations and communities to adapt to a changing climate; and protect and restore nature.

The Brazilian government has committed to put zero hunger, sustainable agriculture and food systems centre-stage at the G20 this year, through its Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, and has committed to work closely with Italy and the rest of the G7 on this agenda. President Lula has also rightly placed the ongoing deeper reboot and replenishment of the multilateral development bank system at the heart of his G20 agenda. His leadership – in partnership with African governments and the G7, and harnessing such key moments as the UN Summit for the Future – could drive major progress at this critical time, starting at the Spring Meetings this April.

The post Spring Meetings can jump-start financial reform for food and climate  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Debt-laden growers want an existing government procurement system to be made legally binding and to raise the minimum price for a wider range of crops – which could help them move away from thirsty rice and wheat farming.

But some agricultural analysts argue that bolstering the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for produce would not resolve the wider climate problems farmers face, nor ease demand for scarce water resources.

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Deedar Singh, a 50-year-old farmer from Patiala, joined a march towards Delhi in mid-February and spoke to Climate Home at a camp on the Punjab-Haryana border, 200 km from Delhi. He participated in a similar mobilisation back in 2020 that lasted for just over a year.

With a family of nine to support, he complained that his five-acre landholding and meagre income of 200,000 rupees per year ($2,400) cannot provide a decent quality of life, especially as weather extremes worsen.

“If untimely rain destroys our rice or hot temperatures shrink the wheat grain, our crops are ruined, leaving us unable to even cover the costs of the next cropping season,” said Singh. Most people in his village rely on financial support sent by their children who have migrated abroad, he added.

Farmers gather at the Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, to burn effigies of political leaders and shout slogans in support of the protest, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Globally, India accounts for 10% of agricultural output and is the second-largest producer of rice and wheat. It is also the biggest consumer of groundwater. Its 260 million farmers depend heavily on depleting water reserves to irrigate their crops.

That means they are also struggling with climate change, as about 65% of the country’s cropped area depends on rainwater. Erratic rainfall and shorter winters are harming yields, with heavy downpours causing flooding and a sudden spike in temperatures a year ago causing wheat grain to shrink.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) reports that for every 1C increase in temperature, wheat production suffers a significant decline of 4-5 million tonnes.

Debt drives suicides

Water resources are running low and farmers’ input costs have soared – yet the government-administered minimum support price (MSP) has not risen accordingly, said Ramandeep Singh Mann, an agriculturist and member of Kisan Mazdoor Morcha, an umbrella body spearheading the current protest.

That has left farmers with no money to pay for contingencies and has forced many to take on high levels of debt, he said.

“At some point your back breaks. When that happens, there is no other solution but to take extreme steps,” he added, referring to suicides among indebted farmers.

To boost falling yields, farmers are using more inputs like water and fertilisers, leaving them with higher production costs and lower profit margins.

Some states have provided free or subsidised electricity, as well as loan forgiveness for debt-strapped farmers, but since 2014, only half of the intended waiver recipients have benefited, according to a study by the State Bank of India.

These woes have fuelled a growing wave of protest, as farmers feel they have no other recourse.

Nonetheless, Sardara Singh Johl, a 97-year-old agricultural economist from Ludhiana and former vice-chancellor at Punjab Agricultural University, said the latest mobilisation was unlikely to result in the dialogue required to address the broader problems facing farmers.

“They already have MSP for wheat and rice, and these are high-paying crops. Even if you reduce the price risk with MSP, what can you do about the other uncertainties?” he asked.

In mid-February, at the last round of talks with the government, ministers proposed to purchase five additional crops – moong dal, urad dal, tur dal, maize and cotton – from farmers at an MSP for five years through central agencies, but farmers rejected the offer.

Jagjit Singh Dallewal, leader of the non-political Samyukta Kisan Morcha group, which is also involved in organising the farmers’ protest, said the proposal would mainly benefit farmers willing to switch from paddy or wheat to other crops and would not ensure a stable income.

Farmer leaders give a press conference at Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, on February 27 2024. Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Water reserves shrink amid over-use

Economist Johl argued that, irrespective of its profitability, rice is no longer a suitable crop for Punjab as its water table recedes to a dangerously low level.

A study by Punjab Agricultural University found that between 1998 and 2018, groundwater levels in the region had dropped drastically, from 10 metres below ground to 30 metres, largely due to a shift from traditional canal irrigation to widespread adoption of tube wells for water extraction.

Farmers are aware of Punjab’s dwindling water resources, said Mann, but they need guaranteed price support for more crops in order to shift away from water-intensive rice cultivation.

“They know that if they are able to earn as much as they do from paddy, they will grow other crops. But without fair support of MSP, it is hard to make that switch,” he said.

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Uday Chandra, a professor of government at the Georgetown University in Qatar, said key food-supplying states like Punjab have struggled to get their problems heard and dealt with by the national government.

“The problem is that what the Punjab farmer wants isn’t sustainable,” he said, referring to the state’s shrinking water supplies. “The best way would be to bring them into discussion and find a solution that is specific to them.”

Trucks lined up at the Shambhu border, 200 km from Delhi, after being stopped by the central government from advancing to the Indian capital, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Thousands of farmers who were initially stopped by heavy police control outside Delhi have now made it to the capital after receiving permission to protest at the Ramlila Maidan ground. They are determined to maintain their mobilisation during the general elections – which will take place over several weeks from late April until the start of June – if their MSP demands go unmet.

In 2021, angry farmers backed down after the government rowed back on laws that had sparked huge protests. But they have now returned to direct action, calling on the government to fulfill its promises, including demands for pensions, debt waivers, penalties for selling counterfeit agricultural inputs, and withdrawal from the World Trade Organization.

Call for high-tech solutions

Mann said climate change is compounding their woes – yet while the government acknowledges the problem, it is doing little to help the sector deal with it.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

However, at the ICAR’s Annual General Meeting last month, Arjun Munda, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, said the Modi government is committed to bolstering the agricultural sector and supporting farmers, including with high-yielding, resilient seed varieties released by ICAR in the past decade.

It also issues Agromet weather-based crop advisories with the India Meteorological Department to about 60 million farmers twice a week and promotes practices for more efficient use of water and nutrients.

But protesting farmers said the government’s measures are failing to help them adapt adequately to a changing climate and water shortages.

Bhupinder Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Mohali district, discusses his transition to organic farming methods as a means to prevent the burning of stubble remaining after rice cultivation, November 26 2023. (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Haranjeet Singh, 53, of Ludhiana in Punjab, said the rice variety farmers are now planting gives smaller harvests, after the government suspended use of a more productive but thirstier variety which also took longer to mature and produced more stubble – a major cause of air pollution when burned.

“Unfortunately, these new seeds don’t give us as much yield,” he said. “We are spending the same amount of money and getting less in return.”

Madhura Swaminathan, daughter of the late MS Swaminathan – the architect of India’s Green Revolution which boosted crop yields and tackled the nation’s food scarcity issues in the 1970s – believes greater use of technology could help.

The professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore pointed to an example she encountered in Amritsar a few years ago, where groundwater sensors were connected to mobile apps, enabling users to remotely control water pumps and conserve water.

“We must embrace new technologies, farming practices, and techniques to tackle the challenges brought by climate change,” she said.

The post What will it take to protect India’s angry farmers from climate threats? appeared first on Climate Home News.

As global policymakers, nonprofit advocates and industry leaders meet this week in Geneva to turn lofty promises to slash methane emissions into meaningful action, a crucial stakeholder will largely be missing from the table: the private sector.

The aim of the 2024 Global Methane Forum is to build on the Cop26 climate summit, where more than 150 countries pledged to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030, as well as other methane commitments made at last year’s Cop28.

But ratcheting up private sector action remains a looming agenda item. Because for all those promises, we aren’t seeing the companies in the sectors that contribute most to humanity’s methane emissions – agriculture and energy – take the ambitious steps needed to fulfill them.

In fact, new findings show the energy industry’s methane emissions didn’t budge last year from a near all-time high. Nor have we seen enough investors step up to drive this needed action in the companies they hold.

Fossil fuel industry under pressure to cut record-high methane emissions

Food companies’ agricultural activities, especially raising livestock, and fossil fuel operations, largely from oil and gas companies, are responsible for nearly equal parts of 75% of human-caused methane emissions worldwide.

Food and energy corporations must confront the escalating material financial risks they face from climate change. Lowering methane emissions is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to slow the overheating of our planet in the short term.

There are three key actions companies across both sectors can take to mitigate their main sources of methane pollutants – and in doing so, accelerate the transition to more sustainable and resilient systems for feeding and powering our world.

Disclose plans for reducing emissions

Before they can tackle them, companies need to understand what their methane emissions are, where they come from, and how they can reduce them. These details should be disclosed in their transition plans so that external stakeholders, including investors who use the information to evaluate climate risk in their portfolios, can hold companies accountable for voluntary methane commitments.

More major food companies benchmarked by Ceres in our investor-led Food Emissions 50 initiative are reporting the drivers of their supply chain emissions, but only a few, such as Yum! Brands and Starbucks, have disclosed how they address livestock emissions. Since most of the sector’s methane emissions – and around 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions – stem from livestock, it’s critical that companies include this in their plans.

Oil and gas companies, for their part, should join sector-wide efforts like the United Nations Environment Programme’s Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, which seeks to improve accuracy and transparency of methane data and track corporate progress. Over 130 businesses globally are participating in this partnership and have committed to report their measurement-based emissions, set a methane reduction target, and submit an implementation plan.

Leverage technology

In both sectors, companies must embrace existing and emerging technologies for the global community to successfully reach its methane reduction goals.

Food companies won’t be able to meet their emissions targets using current agricultural technologies and practices, but livestock emissions could be cut substantially through sustainable changes to farming practices. Companies will have to invest in, and incentivise farmers to adopt, new technologies that are already gaining traction, such as seaweed feed additives for cattle, and other proven and ready-to-deploy methods for curtailing agricultural methane.

To achieve net zero by 2050, methane emissions from fossil fuel operations need to fall by around 75% between 2022 and 2030. That may seem like an enormous task, but oil and gas companies can avoid more than 75% of current emissions using known technology, including replacing methane-emitting equipment with zero-emitting alternatives, with close to 50% of emissions avoidable at no net cost.

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Advocate for new policies

Government policies can create new opportunities and mandates that support sector-wide methane action – and companies need to advocate for them. Ahead of Cop27, 800-plus investors representing nearly $42 trillion assets under management signalled just how essential policies are to reaching a net zero economy when they called on governments to radically increase their climate ambition.

Recently, we have seen new policies open important pathways for funding and advancing lower-emissions agricultural solutions, such as when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration streamlined the process for methane-inhibiting feed additives to gain regulatory approval last month. Before and at Cop28, the European Union adopted more stringent regulations, and Canada proposed robust regulations to significantly reduce oil and gas methane emissions.

With the international climate community’s eyes on methane this week, and 2030 rapidly approaching, it’s time to focus on igniting action where the opportunity – and responsibility – for cutting emissions is the greatest. If food and fossil-fuel companies do not clean up their operations, they will not be able to uphold their climate commitments, nor will we meet our global methane goals.

The post Companies still missing in action on methane-cutting goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

Flood water had destroyed all her corn crops, an essential lifeline to feed her family and earn a modest income. The spiralling costs of seeds and fertilisers put replanting beyond her reach.

“The cyclone left me completely with nothing”, she told Climate Home News.

As Sandram searched for help, she said no relief was available aside from the limited support she could obtain from family members.

Elube Sandram was among the beneficiaries of the UK-funded programme in Malawi’s Chikwawa district. Photo: Raphael Mweninguwe

Her problems could have been prevented. In 2018, she registered for a £52 million ($63m) UK aid programme which helped vulnerable Malawians better cope with climate-driven floods and droughts.

But during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the UK government cut back its aid spending, ending support for Sandram and many others in Malawi and around the world.

Let down

The programme that Sandram was involved with was run by UN agencies and NGOs and helped farmers by providing them with tools, training on things like pig farming and financial assistance like weather-related insurance or cash transfers.

The idea was that it’s not quite so disastrous if a flood or a drought destroys a farmers’ crops if they have livestock or an insurance payout to keep putting food on the table.

But following the UK’s cutbacks, several parts of the scheme have been reduced or axed altogether.

The activities run by a group of NGOs were wound down in 2021, two and a half years before their scheduled end. Concern Worldwide and Goal Malawi, the main implementing partners, closed their local offices. Only a series of projects with a more limited scope operated by UN agencies are still running.

Aubrey Kabudula, a farmer from Kwataine Village in Chikwawa, told Climate Home: “We were told that one of the objectives is to help people to be climate-resilient.”

“With its abrupt closure we do not think that has been achieved,” he said.

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It is an assessment shared by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), the UK body tasked with scrutinising how foreign aid is spent.

In June, they said that the project had been “highly effective and coherent” but had been “undermined” by cutbacks to aid and the downsizing or removal of components.

A rice field in Malawi’s Karonga region affected by drought in early 2023. Credit: Eldson Chagara

Issues are only likely to get worse. Malawi is increasingly struggling with more frequent and intense cycles of flooding and droughts. The passage of Cyclone Freddy in March killed more than 600 people and displaced at least 650,000 more, while also dismantling infrastructures and livelihoods.

Climate shocks have exacerbated poverty levels, especially for rural farmers. The World Bank estimates that over half of the country’s 19.1 million people live in poverty with women being the most affected. Low agriculture production because of droughts and floods is cited as one of the main causes.

Rishi Sunak’s rollbacks

Countries like Malawi cannot afford to address these problems alone.

Unsustainable levels of existing public debt rule out borrowing at expensive rates as an option. Most of Malawi’s climate plans are funded through grant-based international public finance provided by rich countries like the United Kingdom.

At the United National General Assembly in 2019 the then-prime minister Boris Johnson made a big, and unexpected, announcement.

He promised the UK would double its international climate finance to reach a target of £11.6 billion ($14.2bn) in 2026.

Only a few months later the global Covid-19 pandemic upended daily lives and economic orders, prompting an abrupt rethink of spending priorities.

International aid was one of the casualties. Then finance minister Rishi Sunak cut its foreign aid target from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5%.

With Sunak now prime minister, this “temporary measure” has yet to be reversed.

Since then, the competition for a shrinking pool of money has intensified as aid funding has been diverted to support Afghan and Ukrainian refugees hosted in the UK.

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An internal government document reported on by the Guardian suggested the £11.6bn goal could be dropped as general aid cut-backs make it a “huge challenge”.

Not just Malawi

The cuts have hit climate projects around the world. UK-funded climate resilience projects have been cut or delayed in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya and small-island states.

Government figures show that the number of people whose climate resilience was improved by UK aid flatlined for the first time since records began in the last financial year.

In India, a foreign office report found that budget cuts meant that activities to help rural communities cope with climate impacts had been “reduced, slowed down and stopped in some instances”.

In Pakistan, a foreign office report found that a £38 million ($46m) climate resilience plan had been paused for 18 months because of “uncertainty… following significant and unanticipated costs incurred to support the people of Ukraine and Afghanistan in finding refuge in the UK.

A large-scale project aiming to help a series of African countries build resilience to climate change suffered a significant “scale back from its original ambition”, as its annual summary said.

The programme envisaged a £250 million ($306m) budget in its business case, but this has now been reduced to “up to £100 million” ($122m).

Targets have been scaled back too. One original target was to improve the resilience of four million people through an early-warning system. That’s been reduced to three million.

In Chikwawa the climate project has still left a mark in the minds of many people despite the cutbacks.

The beneficiaries now hope that the country, a former British colony, will not be entirely forgotten.

“I am still optimistic that the assistance that we were receiving from the donor [UK government], will not be gone forever,” said Sandram. “And if I were to be asked whether that funding should resume or not, I will say it should resume because climate change is here to stay.”

The post UK aid cuts leave Malawi vulnerable to droughts and cyclones appeared first on Climate Home News.

After months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, nineteen countries signed up to the India-led coalition. These included the United States and Brazil, the world’s top biofuel producers.

“India wanted to bring international attention to a subject important to them,” a source involved in the alliance’s creation told Climate Home News. “They thought this was a low-hanging fruit that countries had not talked about much and they could turn it into an international topic.”

The alliance pitches biofuels as key to the energy transition away from fossil fuels. But critics argue they could do more harm than good by diverting land away from other priority uses, fuelling deforestation and unleashing significant amounts of emissions across their supply chains.

What are biofuels?

Biofuels are any type of fuel derived from organic matter, whether plants, animal waste or algae. Most are liquid fuels used for transportation, typically blended in varying percentages with conventional fossil-based petrol or diesel.

Over 90% of liquid biofuels – bioethanol and biodiesel – are made from food crops, like corn, sugarcane, soybeans or vegetable oils, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)

In India, biofuel is synonymous with bioethanol derived from sugarcane, of which the country is one of the largest producers in the world.

Unlike Brazil or the United States, India has only recently become an influential player in the sector following the introduction of government policies and subsidies spurred by political calculations.

Appeasing farmers

Six years ago the Modi administration was facing a mounting problem in politically crucial states. Sugar overproduction and declining prices meant the country’s nearly 50 million sugarcane growers were not being paid in time by sugar mills, which collectively owed billions of dollars to farmers.

As tensions simmered to the surface, Modi made a promise: “I know there are cane dues. I will make sure every penny of yours will be paid.”

The government’s plan to ease the pressure on farmers was to divert increasing quantities of the crop from food supply chains to the production of bioethanol. It set a “remunerative” fixed price, facilitated loans and raised the bioethanol blending targets, driving up demand.

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As bioethanol is sold to oil companies, payments to sugar mills – and subsequently to farmers – quickened: down to 3 weeks from the minimum 3 months’s wait from the sale of sugar, according to the government.

Lydia Powell, an energy policy analyst at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, says India’s push for a biofuel alliance is mostly a “PR exercise” for the benefit of the agricultural sector which forms a “very strong lobby” in the country.

India’s biofuels pitch

India’s efforts to attract interest around an international coalition began in earnest at the start of 2023, when it took over the G20 presidency from Indonesia.

The prime targets were Brazil and the US, which as top producers were easily enticed, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions. “Convincing other countries to join took some time and it was a bit of a challenge,” they added.

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The coalition was originally meant to be announced at the G20 energy ministers’ meeting in Goa, but was delayed while India waited for more joiners. The big day came at the leaders’ summit in Delhi, when Modi flanked by Joe Biden and Lula da Silva unveiled the alliance of 19 countries, shortly after G20 countries had reached a compromise on the summit’s declaration.

According to Francis X Johnson, a biofuels expert at the Stockholm Environment Institute, countries had various motives to join the platform. “Argentina is an agricultural power and could develop its biofuel industry further,” he said. “The UAE has important connections to aviation and shipping where biofuels could play a particular role. Singapore is a trading hub. Poorer countries are keen to have technology transferred.”

Sustainability questions

What the alliance will do is not yet clear, with more work expected in the next few months to define its structure and targets.

Experts told Climate Home News that if it is to succeed the focus needs to be on sustainability.

The US Department of Energy told Climate Home News that “security, affordability, and sustainability will be core tenets of the alliance”.

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Biofuels are considered renewable energy sources because the materials used to produce them can be replenished, unlike fossil fuels. But that does not mean they are always clean or sustainable.

Comparison between biofuels demand and supply now and in a net zero by 2050 scenario, according to the International Energy Agency

As the overwhelming majority of biofuels continue to be produced from traditional crops like sugarcane, corn or vegetable oils, the question of how best to use limited land is sensitive. If it’s being used to produce energy crops, then it’s not being used to grow food or restore carbon-rich ecosystems.

Advanced biofuels made from waste or other sources like algae do not bring these land conflicts, but high production costs limit their scale.

Supply-chain emissions

The climate impact of biofuels has also come under sharp focus. To achieve their emission-cutting aims, they need to be less polluting by the fossil fuels they aim to replace. But specially grown crops require fertilizers and energy often produced with fossil fuels themselves, increasing their carbon footprint.

Barbara Smailagic, biofuels expert at Transport and Environment, says sustainability safeguards in the production of biofuels are “very weak”.  “There are several risks in driving up the production of biofuels: further increasing deforestation in crucial ecosystems and biodiversity loss, reinforcing human rights violations in producing countries, increasing our energy dependence on imports of these fuels,” she added.

Climate and environmental impact can vary hugely, depending on the species, location and management plan. For example, sugarcane production in India is very water-intensive, requiring on average 2,860 litres of water to produce one litre of bioethanol. But, when the same crop is grown in Brazil, the impact on water resources is less severe.

Francis X Johnson thinks it is critical to reduce the overall demand for fuels and energy through efficiency and mode-shifting because an increase in demand is “inherently unsustainable”.

“In this way, biofuels use can expand with lower impacts since the reduced demand would mean that fewer biofuels and less land would be needed to achieve the same emissions reductions”, he added. “And even though electrification of transport will grow, there will always be gaps to fill in sectors like aviation or shipping that cannot easily be electrified.”

The article was amended on 23/9 to clarify a comment made by Francis X Johnson.

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That target was pushed by Brazil but met the opposition of the Bolivian government, according to Brazilian officials quoted in the Financial Times and the Guardian.

“We tried [to include some deforestation targets], but Bolivia explicitly asked for it to be deleted,” said one official, “Venezuela was perhaps [also] reluctant, but since Bolivia was so strongly [opposed], they did not need to speak against it”.

Bolivia and Venezuela were also the only two Amazon nations not to sign a pledge to protect forests at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021.

Between them, they hold roughly a seventh of the Amazon. But their governments are permissive when it comes to extractive activities in those areas—and in both countries deforestation is on the rise.

Agribusiness ambitions

Bolivia’s reported position at the Amazon summit is in line with its policies at home, which prioritise development and the export of agricultural commodities, among others.

Bolivia’s soy and beef exports are small compared to those of Brazil and Argentina, the regional agriculture giants. But they are growing, and the Bolivian government has set ambitious targets for the sector.

To meet them it has built infrastructure, kept taxes on agriculture low and subsidised fuel. It has also handed out forested public lands to internal migrants while authorising more forest clearing and decriminalising illegal deforestation.

Rapidly accelerating deforestation

According to Fundación Tierra, a Bolivian NGO, deforestation averaged roughly 300,000 hectares a year, an area the size of Hong Kong, between 2016 and 2021.

For three years running, Global Forest Watch has ranked Bolivia third in the world for loss of primary forest, ahead of Indonesia and behind only much bigger forest nations Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Yet there’s no sign of the government reducing its support for agribusiness. Declining gas exports have made agricultural exports all the more important to maintain the country’s international reserves.

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“It’s a sector that, even if it doesn’t generate much in the way of taxes, is very important for foreign exchange,” said Enrique Ormachea, an investigator at CEDLA, a Bolivian NGO.

Bolivia’s lack of foreign exchange has damaged its international credit rating, pushing up the price it pays to borrow money.

Recent policies aim to produce palm oil, boost beef exports to China and build biodiesel refineries that would use Bolivian produce—all of which would further expand the agricultural frontier.

Venezuela’s gold rush

On the other side of the Amazon, Luis Betancourt is the head of Venezuelan NGO Grupo de Investigaciones sobre la Amazonía.

He told Climate Home: “In the Venezuelan Amazon we don’t really have deforestation for ranching or large-scale agriculture, what we have is illegal mining.”

According to the IMF, between 2013 and 2021 Venezuela’s economy shrank by more than four-fifths. Millions left the country in search of work. Many others went into small-scale gold mining.

An illegal gold mine in the south of Venezuela, pictured in 2012 (Reuters/Jorge Silva)

The government looked to mining to replace the revenues lost with the collapse of the oil industry. In 2016, President Nicolás Maduro decreed the creation of the Orinoco Mining Arc, taking an area that holds roughly a tenth of the nation’s landmass and five national parks and opening it up for mining concessions.

RAISG, a network of NGOs, has detected almost 2,000 mining sites in the Venezuelan Amazon, where it is estimated some 189,000 people work.

Mines are controlled by armed groups, including guerrilla groups and mining gangs known as sindicatos. Investigations by Insight Crime indicate many are linked to organised crime and backed by elements of the Venezuelan state, who take a cut of the profits.

Lack of interest

One study put the loss of forest in the Venezuelan Amazon at 140,000 hectares between 2016 and 2020, accounting for 1.6% of the total loss across the Amazon in that period.

Asked why Venezuela might have resisted a pledge to eradicate deforestation by 2030, Professor María Eugenia Grillet, an ecologist at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, said it was perhaps because that would imply committing itself to something it cannot achieve in the short or even medium-term.

“Because ultimately the government doesn’t seem interested in the conservation of our Amazonian forests,” she said. “This illegal gold mining seems to be promoted by a certain part of the state, by corruption, by unregulated illicit activities—and by the political, economic and social crisis of the country.”

The post Soy, beef and gold gangsters: Why Bolivia and Venezuela won’t protect the Amazon appeared first on Climate Home News.

Animal agriculture contributes up to a fifth of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including a third of the world’s methane emissions. Because methane has over 80 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 20-year timeframe, swift and absolute reductions from the livestock sector are vital to keeping the Paris Agreement climate targets within reach.

According to leading researchers, even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately halted, livestock emissions could make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult to limit it to “well below” 2°C.

MDBs livestock investments

Despite this, since 2010, the World Bank and other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have invested over $4.6 billion of public money to help expand large-scale livestock production, exacerbating the climate crisis while also driving deforestation, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution.

Tomorrow world leaders will meet in Paris for the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact, organized by French President Emmanuel Macron and Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

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The summit will address key issues, including reform of multilateral development banks, with the goal of “addressing climate change and the global crisis.” Central to such reform should be a commitment by MDBs to end their support for GHG-intensive and highly environmentally destructive industrial livestock operations.

On his first day as World Bank President, Ajay Banga made climate change a clear priority by directing his staff to “double down” on their climate efforts. But words aren’t enough. The World Bank and other MDBs must take concrete steps to preserve the best possibility of limiting global warming to “well below” 2°C. In agriculture, this translates into shrinking, not expanding, the global industrial livestock sector.

Fatal flaws

MDBs are fueling the global expansion of factory farming while failing to account for the sector’s impacts on climate.

In a new report we co-authored on behalf of the Stop Financing Factory Farming Campaign (S3F), we argue that flaws in MDBs’ frameworks for aligning their investments with the Paris Agreement are resulting in the misclassification of industrial livestock investments as compatible with the Agreement’s mitigation and adaptation goals.

A key flaw is that the frameworks are based on countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)–the climate plans they submit to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But the UN’s climate body itself actually finds that NDCs are “not on track to meet climate goals.”

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Equally important, only 40% of countries incorporate livestock into their NDCs, and none have set methane reduction targets from the sector. MDBs’ Paris Alignment frameworks also fail to account for the extreme vulnerability of intensive, highly centralized livestock operations to climate-related heat stress, disease spread, and water shortages.

None of the world’s leading MDBs currently require that industrial livestock sector borrowers provide comprehensive (Scope 1-3) emissions reporting or commit to absolute, time-bound GHG reduction targets.

IFC’s poor record

Even more concerning, a comprehensive analysis by Bank Climate Advisors reveals that the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has systematically failed to apply its own GHG-related environmental standards which are already insufficient to the task of reducing absolute emissions from industrial livestock production.

Only last month, IFC approved a $32 million loan to Brazilian dairy giant Alvoar Lacteos and a $47 million loan to GXYX, a massive pig farm operation in China, despite civil society concerns and opposition to each. Neither company has committed to comprehensive GHG reporting or reductions or time-bound zero-deforestation targets, and neither has addressed other negative l impacts of value-chain activities, including biodiversity loss from feed production and grazing.

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Often, MDBs use arguments about food security and the need to keep food prices low to justify investments in resource-intensive factory farming operations.

In reality, however, a shift away from industrial livestock production toward agroecological systems could more efficiently and equitably feed the planet. These systems prioritize smaller-scale farmers and communities, help facilitate a shift toward sustainable, plant-forward diets, conserve natural resources, and yield significant climate and biodiversity-related benefits.

To honor their commitments to Paris Alignment, MDBs should shift their agricultural investments toward climate-friendly agroecological farming systems that support food sovereignty and food security, and end their investments in intensive, polluting and high-emitting industrial livestock operations. Shifting investments in this way would deliver economic, public health, food security, and climate dividends now and for future generations.

Kelly McNamara is a senior research and policy analyst and Kari Hamerschlag is deputy director of food and agriculture at Friends of the Earth U.S.

The post Multilateral banks’ investments in industrial livestock undermine their Paris climate commitments appeared first on Climate Home News.

The International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) board was initially due to vote at its 30 April meeting on a BRL160 million ($32 million) loan to Alvoar Lacteos intended to help the company expand its operations in Brazil and support wider food security.

Alvoar Lacteos owns and manages industrial facilities in the Midwest and Northeast regions of Brazil, making products such as UHT milk, powdered milk, yogurt, cheese and sweets. The money would be used to install new equipment, renovate existing industrial units and build a new unit for cheese production, as well as for improving the company’s environmental and social standards.

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A group of 16 Brazilian and international organisations, including Friends of the Earth, the Global Forest Coalition, the International Accountability Project and the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, wrote to the IFC in April urging it to reject the loan, arguing it had not properly accounted for the project’s environmental and social impacts.

The decision has since been rescheduled to the end of May. Emails sent by IFC and seen by Climate Home News imply is so the IFC board can consider evidence presented by the group, although an IFC spokesperson told Climate Home “the timing of when projects are taken to the board is dependent on numerous factors”.

Neither the IFC nor Alvoar Lacteos responded to questions about the concerns raised or the delay.

Suppliers emissions ignored

Civil society groups raised numerous concerns about the loan, including a claim that it is incompatible with the IFC’s commitment to align investments with a 1.5C global warming threshold.

The only current climate-related requirement in the project’s environmental and social action plan is for Alvoar Lacteos to prepare its first greenhouse gas inventory and estimate the emissions under its direct control (scope 1 and 2) “following an internationally recognized methodology, and local regulations”.  It has until April 2024 to do this.

There is no requirement for the company to monitor scope 3 emissions from its suppliers, like the chopping down of forests to graze cattle, which comprise the vast majority of a dairy company’s climate impact. The civil society organisations argue these emissions should be “the focus of reduction and mitigation measures”.

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Kelly Anne McNamara is a senior research and policy analyst in the international climate and agriculture finance programme of Friends of the Earth, one of the organisations that has challenged the loan. 

She told Climate Home the IFC had clarified that it was working with Alvoar on addressing its scope 3 emissions by avoiding deforestation on dairy farms and farms associated with sourcing feed. But she pointed out that no actual mitigation or reduction is required under the terms of the loan.

Paris alignment

Two years ago, the World Bank pledged to align all its financing with the goals of the Paris Agreement and it says it is on track to do this for all its new operations from July 2023. The IFC has a weaker target of aligning 85% of new operations by that date and 100% from July 2025.

However, a new climate framework for multilateral development banks is under development which the IFC will be using to assess its investments. It says that”non-ruminant livestock” are consistent with the Paris agreement’s goal but it does not mention ruminant livestock like cows and sheep.

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Campaigners said the framework suggests that such projects will require evaluations against specific greenhouse gas reduction criteria but have seen no evidence that the IFC has assessed the Alvoar project in this way.

“Had IFC done so, it might understand that there is a need for a major reduction in production in the cattle sector in the [Latin America and the Caribbean] region, along with a heightened focus on measures to significantly cut the [greenhouse gas] footprint of existing operations through better management practices,” they wrote in their letter.

This, they said, could include a shift away from intensive feed and milk production, toward silvopasture and agroforestry practices that increase sequestration and do not rely on fossil fuel-based fertilisers and pesticides.

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International development banks, including the IFC, have spent billions supporting the meat and dairy industries over the past decade. Although the IFC stopped supporting new coal projects in April, it has made no explicit restrictions on other activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions.

The civil society groups also pointed out that Alvoar has not set itself a net zero target, and said this should be a requirement for the project.

And they criticised the IFC for not doing enough to understand other potential environmental and social issues linked to dairy supply chains, such as child and forced labour, land rights and deforestation.

Alvoar does not own any cattle farms so its milk is sourced from 5,500 farmers, including dairy cooperatives and individual farmers, as well as middlemen. Campaigners say it has no supply chain management system in place to address these.

No hard requirement

Although the IFC expects Alvoar to develop such a system if the loan is approved, campaigners note that there is no hard requirement to achieve full supply chain traceability or zero deforestation by a specific date.

Campaigners argue the IFC was wrong to conclude that any risks from the project would be short-term and localised and said it should have required a more comprehensive environmental and social assessment and mitigation plan.

Although the loan is in part intended to help Alvoar boost its environmental and social standards, critics said the onus was on the IFC to understand those risks in advance.

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Campaigners also question whether the loan will actually help increase food access for the neediest Brazilians.

IFC loans are normally approved without controversy. But last year a decision on whether to approve another agricultural project – soy and corn feed sourcing by the Brazilian arm of a major European meat producer – was also delayed after campaigners expressed doubts about its impact on deforestation.

McNamara said that, although the earlier loan was eventually approved, some IFC board directors abstained and several encouraged campaigners to keep raising concerns. In the case of the Alvoar project, however, she thinks food security arguments are likely to over-ride other considerations.

The IFC board is made up of 25 representatives of different governments.

This article was updated on 26 May 2023 to include IFC’s statement

The post World Bank body delays vote on controversial loan to Brazilian dairy firm appeared first on Climate Home News.

The initiatives are meant to slash methane emissions by changing irrigation methods in rice paddies. But projects in which Shell is involved have implemented a series of accounting tricks that would help them avoid stricter controls.

The oil and gas giant says the projects, certified by the leading carbon standard Verra, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase rice productivity, and provide job opportunities – particularly for women.

But their integrity is now under question.

Verra is now carrying out a quality review of its rice farming offsets after identifying a series of concerns with how rules were applied. It also banned any future use of the methodology under which the activities were developed.

Verra has put the projects linked to Shell on hold, pending its review. But the activities have already generated hundreds of thousands of carbon credits, which have been used by fossil fuel giants to compensate for part of their greenhouse gas emissions.

An investigation by Climate Home News has found alarm bells could have rung sooner.

It found rice paddies which are part of Shell’s carbon offsetting projects have allegedly been chopped into smaller plots to avoid stricter rules, according to an analysis of satellite images and emission reductions data.

Additionally, the techniques used are not entirely new, which further undermines their integrity. For nearly two decades, China had already rolled out the methane-reducing irrigation techniques championed by the project.

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Shell acts as a ‘carbon credits broker’ in at least nine of the Chinese rice farming projects currently under review by Verra. The role grants the oil and gas giant the right to either claim the credits against its own emissions or transfer them to other companies, potentially profiting from their sale.

Fossil fuel companies including state-owned PetroChina have purchased more than 450,000 carbon credits issued by the rice farming projects in which Shell is involved. According to Quantum, a carbon market data provider, credits in Chinese rice farming projects have been traded for around $6, meaning that Shell may have pocketed up to $2.7m from their sale. 

Gilles Dufrasne, an expert from Carbon Market Watch, says the findings “raise concerns about the quality of the credits”.

“If project proponents are willing to ‘game the system’ in that way, these credits are not worth what they’re supposed to be worth. They should not be used for offsetting emissions”, he added.

Verra said it takes any concerns about the integrity of projects registered in the VCS Program very seriously and is committed to investigating them thoroughly.

A Shell spokesperson told Climate Home News the company is conducting its own internal review.

“We are aware of the review Verra is conducting of some of its rice cultivation projects and will look carefully at the results when they are published. Our diverse portfolio of carbon credits includes rice cultivation,” it added.

Carbon credits form an integral part of Shell’s net zero strategy. The company aims to offset emissions of around 120 million tonnes a year by 2030 with nature-based solutions of “the highest independently verified quality”.

But Shell has also become a major player in producing offsets, as well as buying them. In 2022 it invested $92 million in carbon credits projects.

This line of Shell’s business has repeatedly come under fire. The company’s purchase of forest carbon credits has been a particular focus of controversy. At the same time, however, Shell has been acquiring a primary role in a nascent, and less scrutinised, niche of the carbon credits market: rice farming.

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Lowering rice emissions

The farming of rice is a big contributor to climate change. The flooded fields, known as paddies, that rice traditionally grows in, encourage bacteria.

This breaks down decaying plants, turning them into a potent greenhouse gas called methane.

To reduce the damage to the climate and save water, over the last few decades some farmers have started to periodically drain their fields. With less standing water, there are fewer bacteria and less methane.

A rice farmer in a field irrigated with alternate wetting and drying methods. Photo credit: IRRI Photos/Flickr

In the early 2000s, the UN’s official carbon offsetting scheme was set up. Known as the Clean Development Mechanism, it established a set of rules for how to get paid to reduce emissions.

One of these sets of rules was meant to reward rice farmers for reducing their methane emissions, encouraging them to drain their fields.

The scheme was aimed at small communities who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford the switch to the more climate-friendly irrigation method.

To encourage small farmers to get involved, the rules allow small-scale projects to face fewer checks and paperwork.

Any project which cuts less than 60 kilo tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent every year is defined as small-scale.

But announcing a review of the methodology, Verra said it was concerned about how certain projects had been categorised as small-scale, therefore benefitting from looser requirements.

Chopped up rice fields

Climate Home News has analysed all of the 37 rice farming projects that have been registered by Verra using this methodology.

On average they declared annual emission reductions of 58.2 kilo tonnes of CO2. For one of the Shell projects the number is 59.99.

In other words, they manage to qualify as small-scale by a very narrow margin. If they had surpassed the 60 kilo tonnes threshold, they would have not been eligible as carbon credits.

Shell is a partner in at least nine paddy fields offsetting projects in China. They are all located in one of the country’s most important areas for rice production, the Eastern Anhui province.

On paper, the projects are presented as unrelated small-scale initiatives. But, at closer inspection, the similarities are striking. They were all approved on the same day, 29 May 2017, by the same proponent: Hefei Luyu, an agricultural technology company based in the capital of the Anhui province. The documents outlining the project's characteristics are broadly identical to one another and were written by the same Shanghai-based consultancy.

Each of those projects bundles together ten of thousands of disparate farms sitting on either side of the Yangtze river.

Our analysis can point to the close proximity of rice paddies grouped by Hefei Luyu under distinct projects. Climate Home News has identified the geographical location of the farms on satellite images. They show rice paddies intersecting into different projects without clear distinction. As little as 280 metres separate farms belonging to separate projects.

If all of those rice projects were merged into one, they would stretch for over 200 kilometers. They would also sum emissions reductions of over 500 kilo tonnes of CO2 per year, rendering them ineligible to be registered as carbon offsets.

Some of the rice fields included in different offsetting projects are only a few hundred meters away from one another

Verra began registering the projects in 2021 after having the proponent’s claims verified by external certification bodies based in China. Now, nearly two years later, Verra says its review has identified quality issues with the work of the validators.

Verra told Climate Home News it cannot comment on specific projects while they are under review.

Kazunori Minamikawa, a senior researcher at the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences who has conducted several studies on irrigation methods in rice paddies, believes the projects’ proponent may have artificially divided up fields across several projects to obtain the ‘small-scale’ status.

“They just follow the current rule,” he told Climate Home News. “But I think the developers of AMS-III.AU [the rice cultivation methodology] did not imagine such loophole at that time. To solve the concerns in the short run, Verra should create additional strict rules.”

Hefei Luyu did not respond to a request for comment.

Credits without integrity

The categorisation of a project as small-scale is not a trivial matter. In fact, this grants proponents a series of advantages.

Small-scale projects have more leeway in demonstrating that their type of activity is not already a common practice in the project's region. This key principle is known as additionality.

Under this requirement, a proponent needs to demonstrate that its emission reduction project would not have happened without the money obtained through the sale of carbon credits.

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Carbon Market Watch’s Gilles Dufrasne says the concept of additionality underpins the credibility of a carbon offsetting activity.

“The whole logic is that these projects should generate extra emission reductions and that's why they can be used to compensate other emissions somewhere else,” he told Climate Home News. “So it's plus one here, minus one there, it sort of matches up. But if that is not true, it actually leads to an increase in overall emissions. The entire system falls apart”.

The rice farming projects aim to cut methane emissions by helping farmers change irrigation method, switching from continuously flooded paddies to intermittently flooded ones. Thanks to the carbon credits, the projects outline says, farms have been equipped with the cement ditches necessary for the new water regime.

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Documents submitted by the proponents claim people in the areas “have poor living standards and economic backwardness”. Therefore, they would have been unable to implement a new methane-cutting irrigation system without the carbon offsetting initiatives. The documents add the additionality findings are based on surveys conducted by a local academy of social sciences.

Climate Home News has not been able to check the claims.

But opinions from experts and scientific literature suggest that the use of intermittent flooding in Chinese rice paddies is not entirely a new concept.

Chris Butenhoff, a physicist from Portland State University, studied efforts to reduce methane emissions in Chinese rice paddies in the early 2000s. He says it is certainly the case that changes in rice water management in China likely date back to at least the 1980s.

“The transition to intermittent flooding and drying of the rice paddy was driven in part by increased demand for water resources due to population growth, industrialization and expansion of hydropower resources,” he added.

Butenhoff says the data on this is poor so it is hard to have a precise historical record of how the practice spread geographically.

Rice farmers in the Anhui province of China take part in a trial implementing water-saving techniques. Photo credit: IRRI Photos/Flickr

Scientific studies suggest that in 2018 - when the offsetting projects began - around 41% of rice paddies in China were already being irrigated using an alternative wetting and drying method.

This rollout has coincided with the Chinese government making water-saving techniques a key tenet of its agricultural policy. The 2015 National Agricultural Sustainable Development Plan urged to “accelerate the construction of an efficient and water-saving agricultural system”. It set out a plan to increase the proportion of agricultural areas using water-saving irrigation to 75%.

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Kevin Chen, China Leader for CGIAR Mitigate + Initiative, says in recent years, China has invested significantly in building high-yield paddies through the construction of good irrigation systems. “At present, the water management method of paddy fields in most areas of China has changed from traditional flooding irrigation to mid-stage drying and wetting irrigation”, he added.

Chen says the impact has been known for a long time. "The adoption of intermittent flooding by paddy rice farmers might have reduced global emissions of methane from rice fields by about 12% during the decade 2000 to 2009".

Verra raised concerns about China’s rice farming offsetting projects not exceeding what is required by government regulations — the so-called surplus regulatory requirements.

Shell’s offsets

The rice farming projects first came into existence years before Shell entered the picture. Hefei Luyu decided to develop all its carbon credit projects at a meeting of their stockholders held on 29 May 2017.

Only three years later Hefei Luyu and a carbon trading consultancy based in Shanghai - its then partner in the projects - began submitting requests to Verra to have the offsetting projects validated and listed on the exchange.

Shell bursts onto the scene after Verra gave the green light. Starting from December 2021, Shell (Energy) China, a subsidiary of the oil giant, signed a series of agreements with Hefei Luyu, becoming a partner in at least nine rice farming projects.

In particular, according to the documents, Shell took on the role of an exclusive agent for the projects. Those were transferred into the Verra account of Shell (Energy) China, granting the company the right to request the issuance and transfer of carbon credits generated by the projects.

“Shell appears to be acting as a broker for the carbon credits”, Carbon Market Watch’s Gilles Dufrasne says.

“This is becoming increasingly common. Once they have access to the credits they can do what they want. They can use the credits towards their own targets or they can profit by selling them to other companies.”

In recent years, Shell has become an increasingly active player in the carbon credits industry through partnerships and direct acquisition of project developers.

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On a dedicated webpage illustrating its carbon credits portfolio, Shell says it “employs a rigorous internal screening process” to ensure it invests in activities with clear climate and environmental benefits. Shell’s environmental products division markets these carbon credits to customers needing them for compliance requirements or voluntary carbon compensation.

The portfolio lists dozens of offsets, including the nine rice farming projects in the Anhui province. Shell says they “cut greenhouse gases, increase rice productivity, and provide job opportunities - particularly for women”.

More than 450,000 credits issued by the rice farming projects in which Shell is involved have been purchased and used to compensate for emissions between June 2022 and January 2023, according to Verra’s registry.

The credits give polluters a license to emit 450,000 tons of carbon dioxide, more than Tonga emits in a year.

Over 85% of those credits ended up in the hands of PetroChina, the country’s state-owned oil and gas company. 

Verra says its investigation does not affect credits that were issued before the review began unless any excess credits were issued. "If Verra finds that excess VCUs [carbon credits] have been issued, the project proponent will be responsible for compensating for these excess VCUs," it added.

Shell and PetroChina are close commercial partners. In 2021 the companies signed a five-year deal for the supply of what they described as carbon-neutral liquified natural gas (LNG). For each cargo delivered under this agreement, PetroChina and Shell promised to offset the emissions generated using high-quality carbon credits. 

At the time environmental groups branded the initiative as 'greenwashing'. 

PetroChina did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Revealed: How Shell cashed in on dubious carbon offsets from Chinese rice paddies appeared first on Climate Home News.

Inderpal Singh, 66, grows sugarcane over 2.5 acres in Bhatipura village, Uttar Pradesh. He supplies it to the local sugar mill, Nanglamal Sugar Complex.

Nanglamal Sugar Complex is owned by Mawana Sugars, one of India’s largest manufacturers. It supplies sugar to multinational companies including Nestlé, Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Singh used to almost harvest 90,000kg of cane in a typical season. This year it will be closer to 70,000kg. He told Climate Home droughts, floods and heatwaves in Uttar Pradesh make his livelihood increasingly precarious.

“No one comes to our help. Neither the mills nor the government,” Singh said.

Some farmers take out insurance against pest damage and weather extremes, but can only claim when a majority of the crop is damaged. Government-promised compensation for climate-related losses, Singh said, is “largely not effective”.

Climate Home News travelled to Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra to investigate the plight of workers in the industry. These two states account for 71% of the country’s sugar exports, which could end up in cans of Diet Coke, KitKat chocolate bars and Häagen-Dazs ice cream tubs sold around the world.

Smallholders like Singh told Climate Home that they felt abandoned and exploited. While the government sets a minimum price per quintal (100kg) of raw sugarcane, erratic yields, changing quality demands and late payments strain their finances.

Climate Home News invited Nestlé, Coca Cola, Pepsi and Mawana Sugars to comment on these concerns and explain how they looked after the welfare of suppliers. At time of publication, they had not responded.

A sugarcane field in Lakhimpur, Uttar Pradesh

Sugar boom

India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar, and second largest exporter after Brazil.  The Indian government described last year as a “watershed season” for sugar production. The country produced a record 35.9 million tonnes of sugar and exported a record 11 million tonnes to more than two dozen countries. The major importers of Indian sugar were Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sudan, and the UAE. Indian sugar also went to the EU, US, Singapore, and Australia.

Consumer goods firms are doing good business. Nestlé India reported post-tax profits of over 2,000 crore rupees ($250 million) in 2021. Coca Cola and Pepsi are not publically listed companies in India but, according to business intelligence platform Tofler, each reaped operating revenue of more than $60m.

Climate Home traced the supply chain of sugarcane grown at farms in Nanglamal village in Uttar Pradesh to mills owned by Mawana Sugars, one of Nestlé’s main sugar suppliers in India.

Mawana Sugars is India’s sixth largest sugar manufacturer, operating two mills in Uttar Pradesh. Mills are critical to the sugar supply chain. They procure and process the harvest from the fields, then send the resulting sweeteners to buyers including the government.

‘Responsible sourcing’

Nestlé, a Swiss multinational that owns brands including KitKat, Smarties and Häagen-Dazs, procured sugar in 2019 from two Indian mills in Uttar Pradesh, including Nanglamal mill which is owned by Mawana Sugars, according to its sugar supply chain disclosure, published in April 2020.

Nestlé claims to follow responsible sourcing principles, which include the provision of safe and healthy workplaces and a ban on forced or child labour. The company states on its website that it only works with farms that “meet at least legal or mandatory industry standards” for workers’ pay and conditions.

Coca Cola says it follows the principles for sustainable agriculture, with an emphasis on prohibiting child labour and abuse of labour and ensuring a healthy and safe working environment. Pepsi says it follows a positive agriculture agenda under which it is trying to source crops and ingredients in a way that accelerates regenerative agriculture and strengthens farming communities.

Climate Home did not find any child or forced labour in farms linked to Mawana Sugars and its customers. The investigation did identify poor working conditions and low pay, however, which made suppliers vulnerable to climate-related losses.

Smallholders told Climate Home that Nanglamal Sugar Complex delays payment, makes unreasonable demands and offers no protection from extreme weather impacts. This traps them a vicious cycle of loss and debt, they said.

Unaffordable seeds

The dominant variety of sugarcane has become prone to pests that thrive under rising temperatures. Mills such as Nanglamal are encouraging farmers to grow new varieties, said Nawab Singh Ahlawat, district president of Bharatiya Kisan Union Arajnaitik, which represents many sugarcane farmers in Uttar Pradesh. But seeds for better varieties cost 3-5 times more, around 2-3,000 rupees ($24) for 100kg. “Only a few farmers can afford it,” said Ahlawat.

“They do not give good prices for [the] old varieties,” said Singh. “They want farmers to sow early and to sow new varieties but they do not give us (sufficient) seeds.”

“Mills don’t help the farmers,” said Omvir Singh Tomar, 65, a Nanglamal resident who supplies to Mawana. He lost 15-20% of his harvest to heavy rainfall in September and October. “No one will pay for this damage,” he said.

Then the Naglamal Sugar Complex was slow to procure Tomar’s surviving crop, he said. “So far, only 10,000-12,500 kg of my sugarcane has gone to the mill… I shudder at the thought that the remaining 70,000-80,000kg of sugarcane may stretch to April or May 2023.”

Unlike some milling companies, Mawana had not invested in healthcare or education facilities for sugarcane workers and their families, Tomar said.

Climate impacts are creating dangerous working conditions for India’s sugar workers and pushing them further into debt

Late payments

A common complaint among farmers supplying sugarcane to Nanglamal is that they are not paid on time, which pushes them into debt.

Tomar said Nanglamal Sugar Complex once paid him nearly a year late. He resorted to selling land to pay for his daughter’s marriage. Smallholders like him are investing more and more in fertilisers, pesticides, better seed varieties and diesel for their irrigation pumps “but the rate of sugarcane and our income are not increasing in the same proportion,” said Tomar.

Ahlawat said several sugar mills in the Meerut area owe farmers money. “Until last year Mawana Sugars also used to delay the payment,” he said, sometimes by months. The delays have not been as long this year, but farmers are still not being paid within 14 days, which according to the Uttar Pradesh Sugarcane Supply Act is mandatory, he added. If mills do not meet this deadline, they are liable for interest of 15% a year on the overdue sum.

VM Singh, the national convener of the Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, has been fighting for 25 years to get sugarcane farmers paid on time. Many mills in Uttar Pradesh owe several hundred crores of rupees (millions of dollars) to farmers, he told Climate Home. “The money that had to be paid to farmers is pending. Some owe money from last year too.”

‘Exploitation breeds exploitation’

Uttar Pradesh officials are trying to tighten the rules so farmers get paid for sugarcane within 10 days of supplying it. Under its Panchamrut scheme, the state government aims to double farmers’ incomes with initiatives to diversify into other crops, introduce drip irrigation and efficient sowing methods.

Kulveer Singh, a 62-year-old farmer from Seohara village in Uttar Pradesh Bijnor’s district, told Climate Home these were empty promises. “To my knowledge no farmer has benefitted from these schemes,” he said.

The Indian government claims that “timely payment and low carrying cost of stocks for sugar mills resulted in early clearance of cane arrears of farmers” last season. Observers told Climate Home that this is not the reality on the ground.

“Farmers are not paid on time. This sometimes translates into farmers not being able to clear their dues to others, including labourers. All this together leads to issues in the whole supply chain. It is like a vicious cycle. To put it briefly exploitation breeds exploitation,” said Abhishek Jani, chief executive of Fairtrade India.

On the way forward, Jani said, “brands need to take action in their entire supply chain. For instance, in the case of cocoa from the African region, a programme has been created and consumers in Europe are willing to pay extra for sustainable and ethically sourced cocoa. On sugar, we are far from that right now but there is a huge need for it,”  he said.

Deepak Guptara of the Uttar Pradesh Sugar Mill Association said no labour or human rights were violated during the production of sugar in the state.

Welfare board

So what is being done to improve the welfare of sugar farmers, in the face of climate threats?

In Uttar Pradesh, there is no specific scheme in place to protect the welfare of workers in sugarcane fields.

In 2019, the Maharashtra government established a welfare board for sugarcane workers to provide them with social security benefits and insurance and improve their overall standard of living.

Shekhar Gaikwad, Maharashtra’s sugar commissioner, told Climate Home that a corporation was initiated in November “for the welfare of farmers under which sugar mill owners and Maharashtra government will put money.” To date the government has paid in 40 crore rupees ($4.8m). The target is $30m.

Maharashtra is the first state to set up such a scheme for migrant workers, said Gaikwad. “Registration of labourers under the corporation has started. As of now, 200,000 farmers from the Beed district of Maharashtra have been registered,” he said.

‘Not functional yet’

But farmers told Climate Home they did not know anyone who had been registered under the programme.

The government scheme was meant to provide sugar workers with insurance, financial assistance and medical aid. Registration would be the first step to access these benefits, according to Raju Shetti, a former member of India’s parliament and president of Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, a group that works for the rights of farmers.

But, Shetti said, “all these plans have just been in the air.”

Sunil Munde a small labour contractor from Ambajogai in Maharashtra, told Climate Home that the scheme “is not functional yet”. He manages 16 labourers and none of them are registered. “There are no funds in it,” he said. “The scheme has not yet been implemented on the ground.”

18-year-old Dhanvir Kumar, of Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh, labours on his family farm alongside studying at school. His family income cannot keep up with rising costs of living, he said. “We grow sugar but can’t afford to buy sugar. Drinking tea with sugar is like a crime.”

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal, Arvind Shukla and Isabelle Gerretsen. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post Cost of a KitKat: Big brands leave sugar farmers at the mercy of climate extremes appeared first on Climate Home News.

15-year-old Meera Gaikwad*, who is six months pregnant, knows her life will change forever when she moves 100km to cut sugarcane in Karnataka this season. There is no work at her drought-prone home of Paargaon, a small village in western India’s Maharashtra state.

Gaikwad told Climate Home News that she is afraid she will have to deliver her baby in a hut next to the fields, without access to medical care.

Thousands of girls like Gaikwad migrate from their villages every year to join in the sugarcane harvest from October until April. In total, more than 1.5 million workers leave their homes for the sugarcane fields.

Climate impacts, in particular heatwaves, droughts and floods, are worsening their plight. Women, some of whom are pregnant, cut and package sugarcane in temperatures of up to 46C.

In August and September, Climate Home travelled to the states of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, where most of India’s sugarcane is grown and manufactured. Reporters found women and girls working in in dangerous conditions for up to 18 hours a day, without access to health or sanitation facilities.

Climate Home spoke to dozens of women who have had their wombs surgically removed, in the misguided belief it would help them to cope with the intensive workload.

Thousands of young girls and women migrate from Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district each year to harvest sugarcane

Double shift

Climate change is aggravating an already dire situation for women in Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district, where farming grinds to a halt for almost eight months due to a lack of rainfall. The region suffered from droughts in four separate years between 2010-2019, according to a government report.

Sugarcane cutting is physically demanding. Women work the fields in all weathers, they told Climate Home – and are also expected to do the heavy lifting at home.

Typically, they wake up at around 3am, two hours before the men, to fetch water and carry out domestic work before heading to the fields at 6-7am. After returning home in the evening or late at night, the women cook dinner for the family and finish off other tasks, such as cleaning and washing clothes.

“The men get some rest, but the women don’t,” said Arundhati Patil, executive member of Marathwada Navnirman Lokayat, an organisation working on socio-economic issues in Beed.

A 2020 study by researchers of Pune-based Symbiosis International University concluded that the working and living conditions of these women “violate basic human rights”. They have to bend for hours, pick up very heavy cane bundles and mount them at risky heights, sometimes in complete darkness at night.

Inadequate healthcare

Many women, like Gaikwad, carry out this backbreaking work while pregnant. They work in all weathers right up until their delivery.

20-year-old Anisha Sharad Bhavale, from Koyal village in Maharashtra, gave birth in a hut near a sugarcane field in 2020. Her baby boy died two weeks later. The nearest hospital was 30km away.

She had borrowed 70,000 rupees ($840) from a labour contractor for her son’s medical care. A week after the birth, she was back at work to start paying it off.

A teenage girl sits on a suitcase in her family’s hut near the sugar fields in Beed, Maharashtra

The unsafe working conditions in the sugar fields also sometimes result in miscarriages. One of Bhavale’s relatives was six weeks pregnant when she tripped and fell into a hole, which led to a miscarriage. Her husband, Sharad Bhavale, said there was no vehicle available to take her to the hospital or a nearby healthcare facility where she could have treatment.

The lack of healthcare and sanitation facilities is a major concern, Patil said. “There is no provision of medicines or doctors that can address their issues.”

A 2020 report by Oxfam India said “public health facilities at the villages are inadequate to address [women’s] ailments”, making medical treatments “impossible”, and prolonging any illnesses they suffer from.

Constant harassment

Gaikwad was married two years ago, when she was just 13. She became pregnant earlier this year. “Until we have a baby, we are considered young and poachable, even after we are married. That is why, we try to become mothers as soon as we are married — to avoid any disgrace to our family,” she said.

Thousands of girls are forced to marry by their parents soon after they start having their period – between 12-15 years of age. According to social activists, parents insist on this to ensure their daughters’ safety and because couples are hired more easily and earn more money in the sugarcane fields.

Thousands of young Indian girls like Meera Gaikwad* migrate from their villages every year, to work as labourers harvesting sugarcane

During their early teenage years, many girls also start working in the fields, said Mahadev Chunche, associate professor at the Kumbhalkar College of Social Work in Wardha, Maharashtra. This is partly to avoid them staying behind at labour tent camps, where parents fear they will be abused and harassed by men, he said.

“If a girl is good at cutting sugarcane, she starts getting a lot of marriage proposals. Single men are on the lookout for life partners as couples get a better advance for working in the fields,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Marriage [eligibility] is mostly dependent on a girl’s skill in the field rather than her education or how she looks.”

A married couple receives a higher amount as an advance for cutting sugarcane – in the range of 150,000 to 300,000 rupees ($1,800-3,600), whereas a single woman is paid 50,000 to 150,00 rupees ($600-$1,800).

Abuse goes unreported

Sexual harassment and abuse are rife in the sugar fields, the investigation revealed. More than a dozen women and girls told Climate Home, on the condition of anonymity, that they had suffered or witnessed abuse.

“When I stay back in the tent and my parents go to the sugarcane fields, sometimes men come to the hut and say bad things… and harass us. They come when they see I’m alone at home… I feel scared,” a 20-year-old widow, who has one child, told Climate Home.

According to a study by Symbiosis International University in Pune, India, “physical abuse and rapes [by male contractors at the worksite] happen quite often though they are not formally reported”.

Chunche spoke to more than 400 women in Maharashtra for his PhD on India’s sugar labourers, seen by Climate Home News. He said that almost 80% of them told him they faced sexual harassment, were molested or raped by male sugar labourers, drivers and middlemen.

“Usually no one says anything or files a complaint,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Sometimes the pressure is from the labour contractors not to speak but the main reason is their poverty. They fear that if they report [the abuse], it will bring disrepute, they will get no more work and there will be no one to marry them.”

Whenever such an incident happens, parents view it as a disgrace to the family and choose to marry their daughter off at a very young age, said Gaikwad.

In many cases, teenage girls don’t complain about sexual harassment as they are scared that they will lose their chance of going to school and be forced to sit at home, she said.

The working and living conditions of women working in India’s sugar fields “violate basic human rights,” researchers say.

Choosing hysterectomy

Women working in the sugar industry endure daily pain, as they lift 20-40 kg sugarcane bundles on their heads, including while pregnant or suffering from menstrual cramps.

“When women work long (15-18) hours or they squat in agriculture fields or when they lift heavy weights, they can develop abdominal pain,” said Himani Negi, a Delhi-based gynaecologist who runs a women’s care clinic.

To escape this constant pain, many women choose to have their womb removed. The practice has been prevalent among sugar workers for years. Women in Maharashtra’s Beed district were twice as likely as the state average to have had a hysterectomy, according to analysis of official data by Climate Home News.

In many villages in Ambajogai, a division of Beed district, at least 50-60 hysterectomy cases have been recorded over the past two decades, according to Patil.

Ishmala Raghu Patwade, who is in her mid-40s and has several children, told Climate Home News that she had a hysterectomy three months ago.

“My stomach was hurting. I was going through a lot of pain. My uterus had developed knots because of working in the fields. It had to be removed,” she said. Other women recommended the surgery to relieve her pain.

But the operation didn’t help her. Since having it, she can no longer work or lift any heavy items. As a result, the sole earner of the family now has to sit at home. Her husband Raghu used to also work in the sugarcane fields but stopped five years ago after he got severely injured working in the field.

Misinformation and complications

In 2019, a report by the Maharashtra government found that over 13,800 women (about 16% of the 82,300 surveyed) involved in harvesting sugarcane from the Beed districts had their womb removed in the last 10 years. Most of these women were in the 35-40 age group.

According to a report by the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management, one of the main reasons women choose to have surgery is to avoid losing wages when pain prevents them from working.

Dr Nitin Chate, associate professor at the Swami Ramanand Tirth Rural Government Medical College in Beed, who comes from a family of sugarcane labourers, blamed misinformation.

“Poverty and illiteracy are two devils,” said Chate. “Due to poor awareness, women choose hysterectomies. After this surgery, many women face a disease called osteoporosis, which is related to weak bones.”

Ishmala Raghu Patwade chose to have a hysterectomy after other women told her it would relieve her abdominal pain

Other common complications include vaginal prolapse, back pain, poor balance and urinary incontinence. “Women should be made aware that this surgery won’t address their pain,” said gynaecologist Negi.

Gaikwad told Climate Home it was her dream to go to university, but she has accepted her reality. “We cut sugarcane, no matter what. Whether there’s sweltering heat, frigid cold, or even if the sugarcane fields are flooded with rain, we have to work in the field to cut the sugarcane. There’s no other option,” she said.

“Do girls like me not deserve any justice?”

*Meera Gaikwad is not the subject’s real name, to protect her identity as a minor.

Reporting by Meenal Upreti, Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

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Karan Gautam Wavhale, 20, wanted to join the Indian Army, but it was not to be. Instead, he became a labourer, travelling over 200km from his home in Koyal, in Maharashtra’s Beed district, to toil in the sugar fields of Karnataka.

He is one of millions who migrate with the sugar season each year. Heatwaves, drought and floods brought by climate change make the working conditions increasingly harsh. And when yields are low, many workers get trapped with debts they cannot repay.

“It is about survival,” Wavhale told Climate Home News. “Due to water shortages several months each year, there is just no work for us here… there is no option for us but to migrate.

“It is not just the story of our village. There are dozens of villages like ours.”

Climate Home News visited Koyal, about 450km from India’s financial capital Mumbai, in August. The villagers were preparing for the upcoming sugarcane harvest season in October. Here, climate change is worsening the already harsh conditions for workers.

Most of the village’s 2,500 people travel to neighbouring states Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh or western Maharashtra for seasonal work in sugarcane fields. There are no other jobs for them in Koyal and many residents hold government-issued Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards.

India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar and the second-largest exporter. 50 million farmers are involved in India’s sugar industry, cultivating sugarcane in an area spanning almost five million hectares (50,000 sq km).

According to the Indian government, during last year’s sugar season more than 500 million metric tonnes of sugarcane were produced in the country. It is a record that the government is celebrating, but it comes at a high cost to vulnerable migrant labourers.

Almost half a million labourers migrate from Maharashtra’s Beed district each year to work in the sugarcane fields

Scorching heat

More and more, these migrants have to work in scorching heat – temperatures exceeded 46C in Maharashtra in April. This takes a severe toll on their physical and mental health, leading to extreme fatigue, anaemia and joint problems as well as depression and anxiety, according to a report by Oxfam India.

Workers prepare the fields, sow seeds, irrigate the crops, cut them with sickles and load the cane onto tractors for transport to the sugar mills in the region. The days last between 13 and 16 hours, over a 4-5 month season.

Sampat Lakshman, a 49-year-old migrant labourer, told Climate Home News that he and his colleagues work day and night during the sugarcane harvest season.

“If we cut the sugarcane during the day, we have to stay till late at night to load it in [the] trucks. There’s no timetable of any sort… there’s no time to get tired,” said Lakshman.

Sampat Lakshman, a sugarcane labourer from Beed district in Maharashtra, lives in a tiny hut with his wife and five children

Debilitating accidents

Labourers are frequently injured by a misplaced machete, heavy load or vehicle accident. Snake bites are common. In extreme cases, some suffer permanent disability, amputation or even death.

Wavhale’s younger brother Sachin was killed in a devastating vehicle collision in 2021.

“We were returning home in a vehicle which ferries workers. The driver tried to avoid an accident. [Because of this] several people fell off the vehicle… when the driver reversed the car, the vehicle crushed my brother’s head,” Wavhale told Climate Home. Sachin’s name was scribbled on the wall of his small, poorly lit home in Koyal.

“Several people suffered injuries in the accident, three people including my brother died on the spot,” he said. “One died a few months later due to injuries.”

Raghu Govind Patwade of Beed district suffered spinal injuries in 2016 when a tyre of a tractor trolley drove over him while he was resting in a sugarcane field in Karnataka. Although he survived, it has not been possible for him to work since then.

“I suffered multiple fractures including one on my hip. Since then, I have been bedridden. I can’t work now and I am stuck at home. I have a bag attached to pass urine,” he told Climate Home News.

“There are deep-rooted concerns in the way the [sugar industry] functions, regarding human rights violations, migrant labour and the living conditions [of labourers], child labour and child marriages, and women’s rights,” said Pooja Adhikari, Business Global Coordinator, Global Value Chains at Oxfam Germany, who has carried out extensive research into the industry.

Minimal facilities

The labourers in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh told Climate Home that when they work in the fields there are hardly any facilities for them, whether it is food, water, toilets, healthcare or electricity.

The sugar mill provides some materials for makeshift shelters from rainfall, extreme heat or cold, Lakshman said. Their earnings are “not enough to fill the stomach but only to ensure that we don’t starve”.

According to the report by Oxfam India, “the tents are small and inadequate to give complete shelter” and “do not have water, electricity supply or toilets.”

A sugarcane labourer plants sugarcane cuttings in Satara district of Maharashtra.

Missed schooling

In Maharashtra around 1.5 million people migrate each year with their children, according to Oxfam. Of those, nearly 500,000 migrate from Beed district, the hiring hub for cane cutters.

Migrant labourers are integral to sugarcane harvesting, Mantare Hanuman, a social activist in Maharashtra, told Climate Home News. “It is labour-intensive work… it requires labour at every step, whether it is sowing or harvesting,” he said. Machines are expensive and rarely used.

During the dry season in Beed district, from November to May, villages face severe seasonal unemployment. Wavhale, who left school when he was 15, said nobody wants to stay behind and work in the fields in Koyal, because they are paid close to nothing – a mere $1-2 per day.

Once the labourers migrate, their villages are left deserted. About 200,000 children younger than 14 accompany their parents during the cutting season and live with them in temporary huts, missing school.

“I know that their education suffers but I have no option but to take them with us,” said Lata Chandrasen Patole, a resident of Paargaon in Beed district. “There is no one else to take care of [them], [provide them with] food and [look out for their] safety.”

Hanuman said parents fear their daughters will face physical and sexual abuse if they are left behind. Many children drop out of school altogether at a young age and join their parents in the fields, he said.

The children of labourers miss school for months at a time when their parents migrate to work in the sugar fields

Debt trap

The migrant labourers and their families rely on credit to get through the year. They borrow money from labour contractors, known as mukadams, who play an integral role in India’s sugar industry. Mukadams act as the middlemen between labourers, farmers and sugar mills.

Mukadams help labourers find work on the fields and offer informal credit for displacement and living costs, under strict conditions. They hire labourers, usually as married couples, through informal contracts and pay them in instalments.

Labourers negotiate payment based on their personal situation: medical needs, whether they are married and how many children they have. An advance is then paid, usually to the men, based on the amount of crop to be harvested by the couple. If crops are destroyed by floods or heatwaves, their advance (and final payment) is lower.

“Once that happens they get trapped in a vicious cycle of debt, due to high interest rates, and their condition is akin to those of slaves. There is no one to listen to them,” said Yogesh Pande, an independent advocate for the welfare of sugar farmers.

The mukadams control who gets paid and when. After his accident, Patwade was supposed to receive compensation from the sugar mill to help pay for hospitals. “But I never got it. It was siphoned off by the mukadam,” he said.

The money Lakshman and his three relatives earn in the fields is not enough to feed their family of seven. “That is why we have to rely on [the] advance from contractors… We have to repay our debt,” he said. His debt stands at 100,000 rupees ($1,200).

The home of sugarcane labourer Karan Wavhale, in Beed district, Maharashtra

High interest rates

Mukadams typically provide loans to labourers at 50-60% interest rates, compared to the lower interest rates of 5-10% provided by banks, said Raju Shetti, a former member of India’s parliament and president of Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, an advocacy group for farmers and labourers.  “They make money while everyone else loses,” Shetti said.  

The fall in harvest yields means many labourers are unable to repay their loans to the mukadams. To make up the shortfall, they have to return for the next season or bring more relatives to work. “If this becomes a regular feature, they will be stuck in a cycle of heavy interest and debt,” said Mahadev Chunche, associate professor at the Kumbhalkar College of Social Work in Maharashtra.

One mukadam, who spoke to Climate Home on the condition of anonymity, dismissed claims of exploitation. He said it is labourers who take excess money in advance, spend it on alcohol and then cry foul.

“In fact, mill owners give us very little in advance and ask contractors like me to bring labourers,” he said. “Now labourers want their money in advance to secure their season while I only get paid at the end of the season. To ensure a steady supply of labourers I have to take money with heavy interest. How can I be blamed?”

In the meantime, labourers like Wavahle continue to toil in the sugar fields in harsh conditions. “Extreme heat or harsh winter cold is a reality for me but I have to work to survive,” he said.

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

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“I won’t ever recover what I invested,” said 67-year-old Kalua Mehmood, a sugarcane farmer in Shahabpur, a village in western Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. Due to scarce rainfall, his sugarcane farm will deliver a poor harvest this year.

The rainfall during the monsoon season, between June and September, was erratic this year, he told Climate Home News. 10 years ago, farmers could count on steady rainfall. “But this year I have already irrigated my crop 10 times with a tube well [diesel pump] and even now the sugarcane has no juice,” Mehmood said, showing its stunted growth and dry yellow leaves.

Mehmood is one of millions of Indian sugarcane farmers who is suffering the onslaught of climate change. More intense and longer droughts and floods, caused by climate change, are destroying sugarcane crops and plunging millions of farmers and their families into debt, while creating dangerous working conditions. In August and September, Climate Home travelled to Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, to hear their stories.

India’s most valuable crop

India is the largest consumer and producer of sugar in the world. Sugarcane is a critical crop for the economy; it accounts for about 10% of the country’s agricultural output and the livelihoods of 50 million farmers and their dependents.

“It is no secret how important sugarcane is to India,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent food and agriculture expert. Further expansion of the sugar industry “needs to be discouraged,” said Sharma. “It is taking too much water.” The crop needs about 2,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of sugar.

“There is just no reason for us to continue pushing for sugarcane when we have options like corn syrup available,” said Sharma. “Rather than looking at adaptation measures, we need to prepare a package to take farmers away from the sugarcane cultivation.”

A tractor ploughs a sugarcane field in Hardoi district, Uttar Pradesh. 

Climate impacts

The industry is feeling the impacts of climate change, Mahesh Palawat, vice president of Skymet Weather, a private weather forecaster in India, told Climate Home.

In 2022, India suffered an extreme heatwave and recorded the hottest March in the last 122 years. Maharashtra recorded temperatures of over 46C and in Banda district in Uttar Pradesh temperatures reached 49C. According to a Lancet report, heat-related deaths of people over 65 years increased by 55% in India from 2000-2004 to 2017-2021.

Following the heatwave, Maharashtra experienced heavy downpours [in July and October], which damaged many sugarcane crops, Palawat said. In Uttar Pradesh, there were drought-like conditions until mid-September and “then we suddenly had heavy rain.”

Maharashtra experienced a sixfold increase in floods between 1970 and 2019, according to a report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a Delhi-based think tank.

“Agriculture requires stable weather… these episodes of extreme weather events are harmful,” said Palawat. “What this can result in is that we may have a bumper crop in one region in a particular year but that can quickly change in the next year due to unpredictable weather.”

Intense heat or extreme cold deteriorates the quality of the sugarcane juice and the overall quality of the final sugar product, according to a government report. Temperatures exceeding 35C-40C stunt the growth of the sugarcane crop and reduce the overall yield, according to a 2016 study.

Despite these climate challenges, sugarcane is still considered a better bet than other crops. According to a government report, the net return on cultivating sugarcane is 200–250% higher than for cotton or wheat.

Not enough water

Between May and September 2022, very little rain fell on Uttar Pradesh.

When Climate Home visited Shahabpur in Uttar Pradesh in September, it had just rained for the first time in 40 days. Farm owner Firasut Ali said the area only saw three proper rain spells during the entire monsoon season.

250km away in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district, Ammar Zaidi, a former banker, said that when he started farming in 2014, he was able to secure 40,000-42,500kg of crop per acre. But in the last two years, this has shrunk to about 30,000-36,000kg per acre due to heatwaves. “We are in the thick of the monsoon season but if you touch the ground all you can feel is dust.”

Sitting in his sugarcane field, Zaidi showed Climate Home his diseased sugarcane crop. According to Bharat Rachkar, from the Central Sugarcane Research Station in Maharashtra, when temperatures exceed 40C, “we see the problem of bugs and parasites in the stem”.  When temperatures drop below 25C, germination is also affected.

“I have calculated all my inputs and my overall costs. At the end of the day, I am not getting the return [on investment] I need to survive in this profession,” said Zaidi. “If I started making a balance sheet, I would be in the negative every year.”

“For every investment of 100,000 rupees ($1,230), a farmer is only able to secure 90,000 rupees ($1,100),” he said.

“Why am I still doing this? It is probably because like many others in my area my family has been connected to this land and farming for ages. I can’t just leave.”

Labourers prepare sugarcane fields in Sangli district, Maharashtra

Broken dreams

Diljinder Singh, who lives in the village Sheetlapur in Uttar Pradesh, told Climate Home News that he has many broken dreams. He used to work for Jet Airways and live in Gurugram, the swanky neighbouring city of Delhi.

In 2012, he left his job and returned to his village, where his family owns land, to run a sugarcane farm. His parents warned against it. Singh believed that with better sowing and irrigation methods, he could farm in a more productive way. But his harvests languished.

“The whole pattern is disturbed,” Singh said. “About 5-7 years ago, we used to get good rainfall and we didn’t require irrigation but today people are dependent on diesel-run generators to irrigate their fields.”

Too much water

Heat isn’t the only problem. In late September, heavy downpours hit Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, damaging 2.3 million hectares (23,000 sq km) of crops, including sugarcane. When heavy rains like this hits, it leads to waterlogged soil which impacts the germination process and stunts the root development, said Rachkar.

“I was born in 1989 and until 2006 I had never seen floods in my region. Since then I have seen [floods] three times,” said Ankush Churmule, a farmer whose family has been involved in sugarcane farming for 50 years.

“Areas of western Maharashtra, where the sugarcane is grown near the river, are facing a lot of impact due to successive floods. In those areas, the farmers are moving to bamboo,” said Rahul Ramesh Patil, president of the Weather Literacy Forum, a group that raises awareness about changing weather patterns.

A farmer removes weeds from floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India

The poor harvests caused by excess flooding also impact people with associated livelihoods such as rearing bulls or transporting goods. Kiran Shamrao, who rears bulls for sugarcane farming in Maharashtra, told Climate Home that flooding had severely reduced his profits.

“Our life runs on the bulls. Before, there was little rain, so we had some work for the bulls. But now, because of so much rain, the bulls don’t have work anymore, and we are at a loss,” he said.

Price guaranteed, timing not

If these regions are so prone to droughts and floods, then why do farmers continue to grow sugarcane? The simple answer is that sugarcane fetches them an assured price as it is regulated by the government, unlike other crops such as cotton and soy beans.

“From production to export, every part of the sugar industry is regulated in India. Farmers have an assured buyer and price and they know every last cane will be purchased,” said Sonjoy Mohanty, director of the Indian Sugar Mills Association.

That does not mean payment is swift. Sharma told Climate Home that payments are “often delayed for a year and sometimes even more, bringing hardship to farmers”.

Because of delayed payments, farmers are struggling to make ends meet and are falling into debt, Zaidi said. “Except for sowing, farmers have nothing in their control– neither production nor the final price.”

Representatives for sugarcane farmers told Niti Aayog, the government think tank, that climate threats, such as droughts and floods, “restrict their ability to switch to alternate crops”.

“These weather conditions lead to poor forecasting and the risk of crop failure is higher with other crops [such as cotton, wheat and soybean],” they said.

The Indian government has established a National Agriculture Disaster Management Plan to understand the impact of climate change on farming and focus on disaster risk reduction and possible adaptation measures for the sector.

But farmers told Climate Home they need more support.

No going back

In such a catch-22 situation, what is the solution?

“With climate change being a reality, the crop patterns need to be adjusted otherwise it will heavily impact the yield,” said 50-year-old Suresh Kabade, who has worked as a sugarcane farmer for the past 30 years. “We need to change with climate change.”

A 2019 study by a group of Indian scientists recommended the development of efficient irrigation practices, the adoption of a heat-tolerant cane variety and reducing the use of fossil fuel fertilisers in the near future to assist the sugar industry and help it adapt to the changing climate in northern India.

Other measures could include farmers adopting solar-powered pumps, getting crop insurance, and being taught to use weather forecasting tools, which are readily available but not widely used due to a lack of training.

Most of the farmers Climate Home spoke to were pessimistic about what lies ahead. Singh said there are times when he regrets leaving his corporate job but now there is no option but to continue. “We can’t go back.”

Asked if he will encourage his daughter to follow in his footsteps, Singh was direct. “My nine-year-old daughter enjoys farming and helps me in the fields. Considering my achievements, I would encourage her to take up farming… but if I consider present-day policies, I would never ask her to go into agriculture.”

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post India’s sugarcane farmers struggle to cope with droughts and floods appeared first on Climate Home News.

More than 300,000 people in Somalia will be in famine by December, despite pledges in 2011 that this should never happen again. The looming famine comes as food prices in Africa hit record highs this year.

All over the world food prices have escalated. Yet consumers in many African countries, especially in East Africa, have had to deal with far greater price hikes, than the global increases.

 A large part of the blame for high food prices has been laid at the door of the Russia-Ukraine war. While this has undoubtedly compounded the scarcity resulting from climate change impacts, the main reason lies much closer to home.

The reality is that Africa’s food markets are broken, exacerbating the effects of climate change caused by emissions to which Africa made little contribution.

Drought in Somalia and in parts of Kenya have seen record food prices, with key staples such as maize meal shooting to historic highs. As food prices soar, food security continues to worsen.

Yet African countries have enormous potential to sustainably expand production and reverse their import dependence, if they can circumvent the defective food markets. The so-called African Cop, Cop27 cannot shy away from tackling issues around broken markets head on to construct resilient regional value chains.

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Probing the broken markets starts with taking a closer look at value chains, and the hold that big corporations have on Africa’s food markets.

Farmers have increasingly become reliant on a small group of suppliers and buyers. For example, the trading of agricultural commodities and key inputs such as fertilizer is controlled by a handful of transnational corporations. This was evident in Zambia in 2018 where four poultry hatcheries linked to these companies were fined for fixing trade conditions and setting production quotas in a long-running cartel case. Other competition cases against transnational corporations are ongoing.

The growing networks of relationships between global and regional companies, entrenched through mergers and acquisitions, effectively undermine competition. Big transnational corporations effectively govern global and regional value chains, perfectly positioning them to exploit the vulnerabilities in food systems.

Recent research points to farmers in countries such as the promising Zambia receiving low prices for their products, while consumers in East Africa pay high prices for their food, and intermediaries along the way capture most of the value.

Why the higher prices?

The Centre of Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED)’s research shows that maize prices in July in East Africa were 30-40% higher than they should have been.

At present, markets are working against, rather than towards the adaptations required. Maize prices show huge margins between the areas of demand and areas of supply, which are not justified by transport costs.

Market concentration among buyers means that farmers are often offered low prices for their outputs, lowering their returns. These farmers, who could easily produce more, opt to produce less because of the unfairly low prices. Maize production in Zambia in 2022 is 25% lower than last year as farmers are squeezed between high fertilizer prices and low crop prices.

Yet at the same time consumers in East African urban areas are paying exceptionally high prices for food on the shelves.

CCRED’s analysis suggests that markups along the value chain are translating into super profits for large traders and processors. This is especially devastating for low-income households, often using around 40% of their income to buy food.

Cross-border trade is not happening efficiently with infrastructure limitations and a small pool of logistics operators dominating the market. As climate change intensifies production volatility can easily be exploited by firms with this significant market power.

Future-proofing food systems

Africa’s food markets require systemic transformation, and three measures could make a marked difference.

The first is investments into the necessary infrastructure for the expansion of irrigation. Around 95% of cropland in Africa is rainfed, creating substantial risk in times of drought.

Secondly markets need improved monitoring, with a focus on how climate change is impacting production systems. Vast amounts of data are being collated by private market participants, who use it to increase their lobbying power and increase profits. The same data, if publicly accessible, could ensure farmers are receiving adequate prices for their produce and that consumers are not overcharged.

Finally, there must be effective refereeing of markets and a strengthening of competition authorities. The burden of proof must be placed on large gatekeeper firms who are currently able to distort markets in their favour and abuse their dominance.

Malik Dasoo is a researcher on sustainable agriculture at The African Climate Foundation. Simon Roberts is an economics professor and lead researcher at CCRED at the University of Johannesburg. Ntombifuthi Tshabalala is an economist and assistant lecturer at CCRED. 

The post Africa’s broken food markets must be fixed to tackle hunger appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sofanit is a gender specialist working as the regional gender and social inclusion coordinator at Ripple Effect, formerly known as ‘Send A Cow’.

Ripple Effect works with smallholder farmers to equip them with knowledge and skills enabling them to improve their livelihoods and thrive.

Farmers working alongside Ripple Effect learn more, grow more and sell more. They can feed their families nutritious food, and by having a surplus to sell can invest in their farms, send their children to school and build sustainable agri-businesses.

In this episode, Sofanit takes us through her journey working with women farmers in different African countries to deliver training programs that help them adapt to a changing climate.

She explains how and why women and children are  disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, and what Ripple Effect is doing to ease the burden on women, children and their households.

Sofanit also explains how other stakeholders can come on board to support this kind of work, ensuring that more and more communities get support to build resilience and
secure a healthy future for themselves and their children.

Sofanit signs off the show by sharing what she wants the upcoming COP27 climate conference in Egypt to deliver in November. Enjoy the show!

Learn more about Ripple Effect on LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube and on their website.

The post Hali Hewa episode 5: Female farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.

Fertiliser prices have increased by 300% in Africa since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted supplies. The continent is facing a fertiliser shortage of two million metric tonnes.

It has sparked a lopsided debate over how best to boost resilience among farmers.

African ministers, multinationals and philanthropists at the annual African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) in Kigali, Rwanda this week see widespread use of fertilisers as key to increasing yields.

Smallholder advocacy networks, on the other hand, say this model has put farmers at the mercy of volatile global markets and worsened food security.

The AGRF is organised by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which was established in 2006 with the aim of “catalysing a green farming revolution in Africa” and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and USAID. 

Food prices across Africa have increased by an average of 42% since the start of the Covid pandemic, Hailemariam Dessalegn, chair of the AGRF partners group and former prime minister of Ethiopia, said during the forum plenary. “Africa is likely to be the only hungry continent by 2030,” he said.

Deadly flash floods in UAE highlight need for resilience investment

Rwanda’s prime minister Eduoard Ngirente, told the forum that “the use of fertilisers, improving seeds and the adoption of smart agriculture, will build resilience and sustainable food security…What we do now impacts tomorrow’s results”.

Gates, AGRA’s main donor, is a fervent supporter of the fertiliser industry. “I’ve never been shy about my passion for fertiliser,” he wrote in a blog post in 2018 after visiting a fertiliser warehouse in Tanzania. “It’s a magical innovation that’s responsible for saving millions of lives from hunger and lifting millions more out of poverty by boosting agricultural productivity.”

In its latest five-year strategy, seen by Climate Home News, AGRA emphasises the use of fertiliser as a pillar of its agricultural transformation. Between 2017 and 2021, AGRA helped “farmers adopt good agronomic practices” by encouraging 75% to use fertiliser. 49% of farmers were encouraged to adopt more resilient seeds.

A 2020 assessment by Timothy Wise, research fellow at Tufts University, concluded that AGRA’s programme was “failing to bring a productivity revolution to AGRA countries”. The programme had fallen short of its goal to double yields, managing a mere 18% increase in staple crop output over 12 years. For three key crops, yields declined: millet, cassava and groundnuts.

Commenting on AGRA’s new strategy, Wise told Climate Home: “There is little indication of a change in focus. Remarkably, the new strategy pays even less attention to farmer outcomes. No concrete goals for productivity improvement, poverty reduction, or increased food security. No apparent plan to measure them.”

Many smallholder farmers are priced out of using fertilisers, Anne Maina, national coordinator of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya, told Climate Home News. “The biggest beneficiaries of this model are the multinationals that sell these fertilisers,” she said.

African nations eye debt-for-climate swaps as IMF takes an interest

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, of which Maina is a member, says farmers should instead be trained to build soil health using organic fertilisers and compost.

Wise agreed that governments should support a move away from fossil fuel-derived fertilisers.

When the Sri Lankan government implemented a sudden ban on chemical fertilisers and pesticides in April 2021, it caused rice and tea production to fall drastically and food prices to surge. The move sparked a political and economic crisis.

But many Indian states offer a model for gradually shifting to organic methods, Wise said. “The lesson is you can’t go cold turkey… There needs to be a transition process.”

The Rockefeller Foundation told Climate Home it was taking “the views of civil society groups seriously, including those groups who criticise our funding of AGRA.”

“Today our funding focuses on AGRA’s emerging work in regenerative agriculture and agro-ecology,” said Roy Steiner, senior vice president for the Food Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation. “We appreciate that well-managed and balanced fertiliser use can be an important input to a successful harvest… Our own funding emphasises the use of natural fertilisers, such as through the cultivation of nitrogen-fixing beans, and other biological approaches to improve soil health.”

AGRA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not respond to Climate Home News’ request for comment.

The post Africa food crisis: Bill Gates and smallholders see different solutions appeared first on Climate Home News.

And Sri Lanka is just the tip of the iceberg, a cautionary tale for other debt-ridden countries.

The Rajapaksa regime is at the centre of this story: its arrogant mismanagement of the economy, its authoritarian populism and its overnight fertiliser ban are viewed by many unfamiliar with our politics as the primary driver for the economic depression.

Chaos ensued as people were unable to find fuel for their vehicles for days. While the Rajapaksas have played their part to destroy my country and deserve to be banished from Sri Lankan politics as the awesome protest movement has insisted, it is not going to solve all our problems here.

Unless we are ready to address the root causes of these crises, we will waste valuable time as much of the country goes hungry.

Oil not charcoal the biggest threat to Congo rainforest, top researcher warns

I remember the night when it all began, sat with my father, listening to his radio of the landslide victory of the Jayewardene government. In the late 1970s, my country, like many others, was encouraged to “open up”. Jayewardene famously said “let the robber barons come”.

Sri Lanka was one of the first countries to liberalise its economy, slashing government support and funding, letting the global markets and companies enter unbridled. What I noticed as a child were the new supermarkets with imported soft drinks and chocolates, which seemed like progress at the time.

It’s no coincidence that we now stand on the brink of famine. Our crisis was not inevitable but the result of decades of devastating decisions.

It may be the first to fall but certainly not the last. In opening up, Sri Lanka abandoned policies of self-sufficiency in food and dismantled social safety nets crucial for food security. Investment in our rural economies and small-scale agriculture steadily declined, and we became dependent on the global food system. We even imported onions and chillies abundantly cultivated in the Jaffna peninsula where I grew up.

The hope was to turn most of our farmed goods into valuable exports like tea, but this meant we were also at the mercy of the volatile global market. The tragedy of generations who toiled and were exploited in tea plantations has been conveniently forgotten.

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Before this grand opening, our farming was a mix of subsistence and income generating livelihoods, slowly developing with incremental investment in mechanisation.

However, with the opening up, expensive hybrid seeds, and excessive use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, locked us deeper into global markets where we had little bargaining power to get a good deal on fertilisers, pesticides and imported food.

Over decades, this model of farming worried some communities as nitrogen and pesticides contaminated our soils and rivers. As a result, over the last decade, farmers have been experimenting with growing a diverse range of crops, working with nature, depending less on fertilisers and pesticides.

As agricultural experts and farming communities began developing a slow transition away from the excessive use of chemical fertilisers, president Rajapaksa decided overnight to ban chemical fertilisers, causing mayhem. Six months later, he reversed the ban.

Seen from space: Extreme drought dries up rivers across the globe

The timing could not be worse as Covid supply chains crunched and global fertiliser and fuel prices skyrocketed. Agricultural yields collapsed, farmers’ incomes fell, and many farmers are now abandoning agriculture.

Sri Lanka is not the only country with this economic disease. According to Bloomberg analysis, contagion is happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan and Ghana, all vulnerable to default on their debt.

For many of these countries the combination of spiralling food and fertiliser prices are pushing them closer to the brink. Many countries, literally, can’t afford this unstable global food system model.

If we are to get back on track, we need urgent assistance to help our immediate food crisis. But we also need to manage and create an orderly transition away from our dependence upon a handful of global commodities.

This means we need a proper plan for how Sri Lanka can feed itself in the wake of conflict, Covid and climate. We must draw inspiration from our farmers embracing more diverse crops and farming methods which means we don’t depend entirely on one crop or commodity for our food and can better weather storms.

This cannot happen overnight. We can be a beacon of hope to others but we need a national food plan, or we will fall foul again.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

The post Sri Lanka food crisis has its roots in the globalisation of the 1970s appeared first on Climate Home News.

The combination of acute shocks to global food systems and a warming climate make for a terrifying and explosive combination. We are seeing the consequences play out right now, as the war in Ukraine will almost certainly trigger a global food crisis with catastrophic consequences for the most vulnerable.

Ukraine and Russia are both agricultural powerhouses, and together account for nearly a third of global wheat and barley exports. 45 African and least developed countries import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, and 18 of those countries import more than half. If the war drags on, countries like Egypt could face food shortages as soon as this summer, triggering what the UN secretary general has warned could become “a hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system”.

Then there’s climate change. One of the most alarming findings in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recent series of reports is that the climate crisis will increasingly undermine food security and nutrition around the world. The IPCC’s report on climate impacts confirmed that extreme climate events like floods, droughts, and storms have already exposed millions to acute food insecurity and malnutrition.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

Perhaps most ominously, the IPCC warns that climate extremes will increase the risk of simultaneous crop losses in major food-producing regions, with potentially catastrophic consequences for food prices and availability.

This is our new reality: A gradually worsening situation for food and nutrition as temperatures relentlessly rise. It’s the frightening backdrop for the world’s geopolitical and economic developments – any crisis in a critical food-producing area could spell disaster on a global scale.

While it’s likely too late to prevent a food crisis in Ukraine, we can help those who are suffering now while working to aggressively reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to future food shocks.

First, we must respond to the growing humanitarian emergency. The World Food Programme’s work is critical and should be fully funded, along with the full UN-wide response.

Second, governments should collectively diagnose the challenges to food security and coordinate their responses. When G7 countries gathered in Brussels in late March, they committed to acting in unison and called for an extraordinary session of the Council of the Food and Agriculture Organization to address the consequences of Russia’s invasion for global food security and agriculture. They should follow through on those commitments.

Sweden set to be world’s first country to target consumption-based emission cuts

Third, critical ecosystems should not be turned into farmland to make up for Ukrainian and Russian food exports. As part of its emergency plan, the EU is considering freeing up fallow and conservation land for increased grain production. The United States Department of Agriculture made the right call when it rejected a request to let farmers plant on land protected through its Conservation Reserve Program. Europeans should follow suit.

Fourth, we can make up for lost food production by minimizing the amount of crops used for animal feed and biofuels. The U.S. uses more than a third of the corn it produces for ethanol to blend with gasoline. The World Resources Institute found that reducing grain currently used for transportation in the US and Europe by 50% this year could make up for the shortfall of Ukrainian wheat, corn, barley, and rye. Let’s prioritize growing crops to feed people, not produce fuel.

Similarly, shifting to more sustainable diets could have a big impact. About a third of global cropland is used to feed livestock. Greenpeace estimates that reducing the use of cereals for animal feed by 8% in the EU would outweigh expected production deficits in Ukraine. And we can make more food available for human consumption by reducing food loss and waste, which accounts for a third of all food produced.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to align our global climate and food goals. A changing climate will require resilience across food systems – from agricultural production to food consumption and waste disposal. At the same time, land offers opportunities to reduce greenhouse gases – from implementing farming practices that sequester carbon in soils to reducing agricultural methane emissions from livestock, rice production and food waste, and cutting nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer overuse.

We are at a pivotal moment. Making the right choices about food – especially the difficult ones – can help minimize human suffering. But if our responses are not aligned with our long-term climate objectives, this food security crisis will not be the last.

Ryan Hobert is the managing director for climate and environment at the United Nations Foundation.

The post War in Ukraine is triggering a food crisis – and climate change has more in store appeared first on Climate Home News.

The seemingly coordinated defence has come from three of Australia’s biggest carbon trading groups, the companies set to be the biggest beneficiaries of a surprise change to the Emissions Reduction Fund that will free them from government contracts and allow them to sell carbon credits into a more lucrative open market.

It follows the former chair of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, professor Andrew Macintosh, revealing that he thought most of the Australian Carbon Credit Units issued by the Clean Energy Regulator were not backed by actual emissions reductions, and represented a “fraud on the environment”.

It’s a period that has seen confidence in Australia’s carbon offsets regime rattled, and sent the market price of ACCUs tumbling.

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CEO of the largest contractor under the Emissions Reduction Fund, GreenCollar’s James Schultz, said in a statement that the firm welcomed the scrutiny of Australia’s carbon credit scheme, while adding that he viewed Australia’s carbon market as “a market we can have confidence in.”

“GreenCollar has been and remains the loudest advocate and supporter of the need for integrity and transparency in the Australian carbon market,” Schultz said.

“This is an idea that is simply in the DNA of our business. It is part of who we are as an independent, science-led, data-driven organisation. We would not be able to operate without it.”

“We don’t simply welcome scrutiny of methods and governance. We demand it. We have been the first to draw attention to the need for change and advancement of methods.”

Australia’s carbon markets have been rocked by the claims that it operates on the basis of flawed carbon offset methodologies.

Concerns have extended to the AU$4.5 billion (US$3.4bn) Emissions Reduction Fund, administered by the Clean Energy Regulator, which sees a considerable amount of taxpayer funds being used to purchase the offset units.

Australian government welcomes high fossil fuel prices, ships coal to Ukraine

The Emissions Reduction Fund’s second-largest contractor, Corporate Carbon Solutions, said that recent criticisms of the Emissions Reduction Fund effectively amounted to attack on landholders and project hosts.

“Recent attacks on the ERF are a direct attack on the more than 1,000 project owners operating to deliver more than 100 million carbon credits over the past decade with approximately 10% of Australia managed under nature-based projects,” Corporate Carbon Solutions said in a statement.

“At a time when more action is required on climate solutions, when more recognition needs to be given to landholders committing to improved environmental outcomes, when all of us need to be increasing our ambition and action in delivering a safe climate, spurious claims designed to undermine and disrupt action need to be called out as being in the same category as climate denial.”

In its own statement, the managing director of Agriprove – a spin off from Corporate Carbon Solutions – Matthew Warnken likewise issued a defence of the Australian carbon market.

“We echo the observations of the Carbon Market Institute that integrity, independence and robust review are at the core of Australia’s carbon scheme and that there are multiple elements of protection built into carbon credits from application and approval through to activation including regular, independent audits,” Warnken said.

“We note that the framework continues to evolve, and we support that evolution, including through our ongoing investment in technology and innovation.”

Carney, Kyte oversee carbon offset rules to address greenwashing concerns

The market price of ACCUs has fallen by almost 50% since the start of the year, falling from an all-time high of around $57 per tonne to about $31 per tonne.

But this remains substantially higher than the $12 to $16 the federal government was set to pay for the offsets under the Emissions Reduction Fund.

Earlier in March, federal energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor announced that the federal government would effectively free carbon traders from their contracts, allowing them to instead sell ACCUs at the higher open market price.

An analysis produced by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggests the Morrison government’s decision to walk away from around 112 million tonnes worth of Emissions Reduction Fund contracts put its ability to deliver on its emissions reduction targets in doubt.

“That 112 million tonnes of abatement was factored in to meet the Federal Government’s official 26-28% target, and the 35% emissions reduction forecast taken to Glasgow,” IEEFA’s lead research analyst for Australian electricity, Johanna Bowyer, said.

“So now, the government is up to 112 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent behind on its emissions reduction task by allowing these fixed delivery contract exits.”

Crypto bubble: The hype machine behind a $70,000 carbon credit

“Carbon credit prices are now much higher than when the original fixed delivery contracts were signed between suppliers and the Federal Government,” Bowyer added. “It’s highly unlikely the Federal Government will be able to purchase new ACCUs at prices anywhere near the original average of $12.50. Prices closer to the current market rate of $30 or even the previous $47 seem more likely.”

“The change undermines the carbon market as a whole. The unexpected nature of the change and the price volatility it has created reduces certainty for investors in the nascent carbon market. Many will be worse off.”

This article was produced by Renew Economy and republished under a content sharing agreement.

The post Australian carbon traders defend troubled offset market against whistleblower claims appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Horn of Africa is facing one of its most severe droughts in recent history. Three consecutive rainy seasons have failed to materialise since October 2020 and below-average rainfall is forecast again March-May.

Jane Meriwas, a pastoralist and the founder and executive director of the Samburu Women Trust in Kenya, spoke at an event in Nairobi, Kenya on Tuesday.

“Trauma is real and people are suffering in silence,” said Meriwas. “Let’s not close our eyes and say that Africa is not suffering and focus a lot on Ukraine. Let’s not turn a blind eye to this crisis because all of us are equal.”

Anti-poverty charity Oxfam warns that average or below-average rains March-May will push up to 20 million people into severe food insecurity in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. Up to eight million more people are expected to go hungry in South Sudan, which is facing a fifth consecutive year of severe flooding.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is making things worse by impeding the wheat trade. The two countries account for about a quarter of the world’s wheat exports. That includes the supply of around 90% of East Africa’s imported wheat.

Wheat accounts for a third of the average national cereal consumption in East Africa, 84% of which is met by imports. Wheat prices have soared 80% since the invasion and further disruption is expected.

Comment: Climate finance should not be made to compete with aid to Ukraine

A drought over four consecutive rainy seasons would be “unprecedented” since records began around 1920, Chris Funk, director of the Climate Hazards Center, at the University of California Santa Barbara, told Climate Home News.

Funk explained that dry spells in eastern Africa are linked to La Niña, a weather pattern that is driven by the cooling of ocean waters in the eastern Pacific.

Human-caused climate change has contributed to the warming of the western pacific, which in turn strengthens La Niña and increases the probability of drought in East Africa.

Exceptionally warm air in the region from December to February also played a role, drying up water holes on which many pastoralists communities rely. Crop production in the region is down by as much as 70%.

Vulnerable people including women, girls, the elderly and the disabled in pastoralists communities are particularly at risk of starvation as millions of livestock have died across the region, said Modi Mbaraza, executive director of the Young Women Christian Association of South Sudan.

Carcass of a dead cow in the drought-affected village of Dhoobley in Jubaland state, Somalia (Photo: Osman Hussein / Oxfam)

The Covid-19 pandemic, ballooning government debt, a desert locust plague and conflict have weakened people’s safety nets.

Global food prices reached an all-time high in February, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war is widely expected to push them even higher.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network estimates that the number of people in need of food assistance is 70% higher than during the previous food crisis of 2016-2017.

Considering the size of wheat demand and reliance on imports from Russia and Ukraine, the World Food Programme predicts that Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia will be the hardest hit from the shock to the global wheat trade.

The price of sunflower oil, another widely used commodity, has also been impacted by the conflict. Russia and Ukraine account for nearly three quarters of global exports.

In Ethiopia, a week after the Russian invasion, the price of sunflower oil rose by 215%, said Gezahegn Kebede, country director of Oxfam Ethiopia, speaking of the “direct impact” of the war on the hunger crisis.

The Ali family has had to flee their home following clashes in Ethiopia are struggling to survive caught between conflict, drought and a plague of desert locusts (Photo: Petterik Wiggers / Oxfam)

Even if the rains do arrive this month, millions of people will go hungry unless preventative actions is taken now, humanitarian groups say.

“The crisis in Ukraine, which is causing so much suffering there, is also amplifying suffering across the world,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

“The brutal truth is at the moment Africa is not on the global agenda. 2022 cannot be the year in which hundreds of thousands die from an avoidable hunger crisis in East Africa.”

Oxfam is urging grain exporters to do all they can to make up for the reduced supply from Ukraine to poorer countries.

The charity is further calling on governments to inject funds into a $6bn UN humanitarian appeal for Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan. Only 3% has been funded to date, while Kenya has only secured 11% of its UN flash appeal.

The post War in Ukraine is compounding a hunger crisis in East Africa, charities warn appeared first on Climate Home News.

Over the speakers, a tinny female voice said repeatedly in English “fuck you”. One person watching online, who asked to remain anonymous, told Climate Home News: “The presenter could not [do] anything since the audio was somehow muted by the hacker. Later, [it] was quite shocking when the screen showed a porn scene. It took about five minutes then the presenter left the meeting.”

In the chat column of the Zoom webcast, random names appeared writing nonsense and abuse of Indonesians, the viewer said. After about ten minutes, the organisers regained control and the seminar continued.

At issue was whether palm oil, which is used in a wide variety of consumer goods, should be considered a forestry product – a question with high stakes for the multi billion dollar industry and the climate. Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of palm oil; expansion threatens natural forest rich in carbon and wildlife.

As the hackers did not say who they were or what they wanted, both sides of the debate sought to blame the incident on their opponents. Palm oil’s defenders paint themselves as victims of a media offensive, while environmentalists see the hacking as consistent with a pattern of intimidation by the industry.

The seminar’s official organiser, Yanto Santosa, is a long-time defender of palm oil from the forest department of Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), where the seminar was held. He told the Palm Oil Indonesia website that he suspected the hackers disagreed with the seminar’s proposal.

His suspicions were echoed by Gulat Manarung, who chairs the Indonesian Palm Oil Farmers Association (Apkasindo) and has served a prison sentence for bribing an official to reclassify land he had planted with oil palm. He attended the seminar and said the hacking was part of a “social media war” against palm oil stoked by journalists.

Boy Even Sembiring, an environmental lawyer and director of the WALHI Riau campaign group, disagreed. He told Climate Home News that the hackers were likely to be “someone who disagree[d with] the academic information presented by the dean”.

Europe conflicted over push to fast-track mining code for the ocean floor

While the seminar’s proposal was that palm oil plantations should be considered as forest, the presenter who was interrupted was arguing the case against. Sigit Sunarta is the dean of the forestry department at Gadjah Mada university and is well known as a critic of the palm oil industry.

In a blog post after the event, he said he was about to argue that palm oil expansion had led to deforestation, reduced biodiversity, increased the frequency of floods, droughts and fires and hurt local communities.

“In the midst of various natural disasters (especially floods) that have occurred in various parts of Indonesia, most of which are considered to be due to the conversion of forests into oil palm plantations, this proposal is considered unethical,” he wrote.

A Greenpeace forest fire prevention team walks through a burned-out area owned by a palm oil company (Photo: Jurnyasyanto Sukarno/Greenpeace)

The replacement of forests with palm oil plantations cuts the habitats of animals like orangutans, tigers, rhinos and small elephants. This often forces them into contact with humans. A tiger killed a 16-year old boy on a palm oil plantation in August.

Fire is often used to clear forest for palm oil and the fires can spread out of control. Palm oil is a thirsty crop and can worsen drought, while deforestation makes flooding more common.

Like all plants, oil palm absorbs carbon as it grows. But it absorbs less, in the long term, than the natural tropical forest or peatland it replaces.

Kiki Taufik, the leader of Greenpeace’s Indonesian forest campaign, said the palm oil industry has a history of using dirty tricks against critics, particularly against rural activists, journalists and indigenous people.

Sumatran tigers are under threat from palm oil expansion (Photo: Paul Hilton/Greenpeace)

In November 2019, two Indonesian journalists who had opposed palm oil expansion were stabbed to death. A police officer investigating the murder said he suspected “the motive is revenge over oil palm plantations”.

In April 2021, a palm oil firm accused a security guard of stealing palm oil fruit and police arrested him. The man was a member of an indigenous group who had opposed the company and his lawyers said there were irregularities in his arrest.

The week before the hacked seminar, a local official was arrested on suspicion of taking bribes from the palm oil industry. Andi Putra was accused of taking a $141,000 bribe to extend a palm oil permit.

On a national level, palm oil producers are represented by Apkasindo and the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki). With the Indonesian government under pressure to halt and reverse deforestation, much of which is caused by forests being razed and replaced with palm oil plantations, they have been pushing for oil palm to be reclassified as a forestry product.

Indonesia and Malaysia’s palm oil concessions (top, pink) are in the same areas as much of their commodity-driven deforestation (bottom, red) (Pic: Global Forest Watch/Screenshot)

Aida Greenbury, an Indonesian sustainability expert, said: “Creating vague definitions for ‘forest’ is a common tactic by policy makers and corporations. In this case, it could be used to change the perception of deforestation being associated with palm oil.”

She added: “Categorising oil palm plantations as ‘forest’ could be used to lower the country’s official deforestation rate, as well as make them eligible for carbon offsets… It would probably even legalise oil palm plantation development in protected forest areas.”

Campaigners fear they may be successful. “[The industry association] Gapki have a lot of money,” said Greenpeace’s Taufik. “They can influence the government…

“That’s why it’s important for us as civil society to fight this because otherwise, five years from now, then it’s become part of the forest and that would be a disaster for us,” he added.

Campaigners seek to curb UK oil production through the high court

At last month’s Cop26 climate summit, Indonesia was one of 141 countries to agree to collectively “halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030”.

But on her return from Glasgow, environment minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar wrote on Facebook that this commitment should not be interpreted as a pledge to end deforestation.

“Massive development under way under President Jokowi’s era must not stop in name of carbon emissions or in the name of deforestation,” she said.

Siti did not respond to a request for comment on the proposal to reclassify palm oil.

The post Hackers throw Indonesian palm oil seminar into chaos, fuelling blame game appeared first on Climate Home News.

In Strasbourg, European lawmakers signed off on the package following three years of negotiations with member states and the European Commission.

The Cap is a huge subsidy programme for farmers across the EU, which accounts for nearly a third of the EU’s agreed budget for the period 2021-2027. It has long been criticised by environmentalists for supporting large agribusiness interests, encouraging overproduction and negatively impacting biodiversity.

The European Commission in Brussels says the policy changes align the bloc’s agricultural policy with its climate objectives while providing a fairer distribution of support to small and medium-sized family farms and young farmers.

ACTION NEEDED: On Tuesday, MEPs will vote on the Common Agricultural Policy.

This #CAP is unfair, dangerous for our farming system and farmers and bad for the climate, biodiversity and animal welfare.

Tell your MEP to #VoteThisCAPdown here: https://t.co/PfV4Ih53vH pic.twitter.com/zv08opLify

— Greens/EFA in the EU Parliament (@GreensEFA) November 19, 2021

But youth activists and green groups argue the reform was watered down by member states and does little to support a move away from harmful farming practices.

Tilly Metz, of Luxembourg, a Green member of the EU parliament, described the deal as “inadequate to fight the climate and biodiversity crisis and the loss of small farmers all over Europe”.

“This is not a reform, or even a stepping stone for a reform. It is, indeed, a mess,” she said.

Comment: Why I am calling on EU lawmakers to put climate at the heart of agricultural policy

Under the reform, farmers receiving Cap support need to dedicate at least 3% of their arable land to protecting biodiversity.

Farmers can apply to voluntary “ecoschemes” that reward them for climate and environmentally friendly practices such as organic farming and agroecology. Member states must allocate at least 25% of their income support budget to these schemes. They have to redistribute at least 10% of the support to smaller farms and at least 3% to young farmers.

Peter Jahr, a conservative MEP for Germany, one of the lawmakers responsible for handling the negotiations with EU member states, told parliament compromises had to be made but he described the new Cap as “innovative” and “more environmentally friendly”.

The delivery model gives member states “more room for manoeuvre,” he said, accusing critics of being “full of mistrust” in member states’ willingness to implement the policy.

“Let’s give it a real chance to develop,” he said.

#CAP text approved. This deal is ambitious, consistent with the #GreenDeal and provides planning security for farmers. Now we call on the member states @eucouncil to put it into practice and make it suitable for all farmers. #CAPreform

— Norbert Lins MEP (@LinsNorbert) November 23, 2021

Opposition lawmakers said the reform failed to align the EU’s agricultural policy with its Green Deal, citing the absence of a cap on payments to large agro-industry and that only a quarter of the support is earmarked to promote sustainable agriculture.

Green lawmakers said the farm to fork and biodiversity strategies already agreed by the EU, which include halving the use of pesticides, increasing the share of land under organic farming to at least 25% and that 10% of agricultural land show high diversity features by 2030, were not reflected in the new Cap.

And the draft strategic plans compiled by some countries “confirm our fear that the environmental ambition will be set as low as possible,” Metz, of the Green political grouping, said.

“It’s giving member states a blank cheque with no guarantees of good results on the ground. Member states will use the new flexibility to change exactly nothing about the status quo.”

Nigeria commits to annual carbon budgets to reach net zero under climate law

The EU’s Court of Auditors found that the Cap has failed to cut the agriculture sector’s emissions and the proposed reforms lack measurable objectives and incentives to link the Cap with the union’s climate targets.

Christine Chemnitz, head of international agricultural policy at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, told Climate Home News that the Cap was “a major obstacle” for the EU to meet its climate objectives.

She described the policy change “a desperately missed opportunity” to transform the EU’s agricultural production.

The EU’s highly industrialised and intensive model has harmful knock-on effects for developing countries, said Chemnitz. For example, EU livestock consume large amounts of soy imported from deforested areas of Latin America, while EU surplus milk has been dumped on the West African market, undercutting local farmers.

“We need a lot of money to transform this productive system and we need a better Cap and completely different financing infrastructure to achieve it,” she said.

The post EU’s reformed agricultural policy fails its climate goals, say green groups appeared first on Climate Home News.

I was among them. Once again, I was urging politicians to implement these abstract and far-away goals of “emission reductions” and “carbon neutrality”.

Since I first took to the streets, plenty of climate promises have been made. But until they are followed through with concrete policies, those promises will remain empty words.

On my way home from the protest, I experienced this gap between promises and action when stopping to buy food for dinner.

In the fruit and vegetable section of my local store, I have the choice between regional produce, and fruit and vegetables that are available all year around and have been cultivated in large greenhouses in Spain, Italy, or Greece before they were wrapped in plastic and transported thousands of kilometers by truck.

While I am conscious of the carbon footprint of those tomatoes and peppers and the poor working conditions of the employees producing, picking and packaging them, one criteria matters most in my decision of what to buy: they are a lot cheaper.

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As a student, I have no choice but to opt for the cheapest option. The same reasoning applies when I decide to eat at the canteen of my university, where cheap food is served regardless of its origin, quality or the seasonality of products.

Like me, millions of EU citizens have to make this decision every day: to buy the cheapest available food or to prefer regional and organic produce that are much more expensive.

The number of people who struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month has increased during the coronavirus pandemic and the situation is compounded by rising energy prices. Most people certainly cannot afford to spend more money on food.

But a reform of the European Union’s farming subsidy programme, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), could increase support for small-scale farmers, organic agriculture, and low-emission agricultural techniques that preserve biodiversity.

The CAP was originally designed in the 1960s to increase agricultural production in Europe, where memories of food rationing and malnutrition caused by the Second World War were still very present.

In this regard, the CAP certainly did a good job, but the context has changed significantly since then. With agriculture responsible for 13% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, the sector has to significantly cut its emissions if the block is to reach its 2050 net-zero target.

The EU’s own auditors found that the CAP is failing to cut the agriculture sector’s emissions despite billions of euros worth of subsidies under the programme being labelled as climate spending.

But change is possible: CAP funding could be shifted away from farming techniques that harm the environment to support climate-friendly farming, namely organic and small and medium-sized farms.

Subsidies for large-scale industrial farming could be capped and financial support could be made conditional on increasing sustainable production methods.

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European lawmakers will vote on new rules for the CAP on Tuesday. This vote is the chance to put the EU’s promises into action.

While Brussels says the reform to the CAP aims to make it greener, the current proposal is far from a holistic shift towards a just and climate-friendly agriculture. Instead, it continues a business-as-usual approach to farming.

Small amendments and tweaks to the CAP are no longer sufficient to respond to the scale of the climate emergency. A profound reform is needed.

As such, I call on members of the European Parliament to vote against the proposed reform and return to the negotiation table. Many promises have been made – now it is time to deliver on them with concrete policy changes.

Robin Ehl is a climate justice activist and the international secretary of the French youth movement, Jeunes Écologistes. He is studying for a master’s degree in European Studies in Paris.

The post Why I am calling on EU lawmakers to put climate at the heart of agricultural policy appeared first on Climate Home News.

The East African nation country has more livestock than anywhere else in Africa. The sector, dominated by cattle, accounts for 48% of national greenhouse gas emissions, according to its improved climate plan submitted to the UN this week. 

The government has identified agriculture as a priority sector to help create rural employment opportunities, boost exports and help achieve economic growth of 10% a year over the next decade.

Urbanisation and a growing population is expected to increase demand for meat, which risks driving up methane emissions, Fekadu Beyene Aleka, commissioner for the environment, forest and climate change commission of Ethiopia, told Climate Home News.

Cattle belch methane, which has a stronger warming effect than carbon dioxide. To limit methane emissions, the government wants to increase the share of poultry, fish, and small ruminants. Under its updated climate plan, Ethiopia said it wants to replace non-dairy cattle with chickens, sheep and goats.

By 2030, the government wants to increase the amount of commercial chickens sold from 33,000 tons to nearly 81,000 tons and produce nearly five times more sheep and six times more goats.

The plan includes replacing cattle and oxen used as working animals with tractors and improving the health and productivity of cattle to produce more diary and meat per animal.

The measures are projected to reduce emissions by 7.6% compared with business as usual by 2030 – subject to international finance.

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Ethiopia said it would cut emissions nearly 69% below business as usual in the next nine years, conditional on 80% of the $316 billion price tag coming from international sources.

Ethiopia contributes just 0.04% to global emissions and has 1.5% of the global population.

With national resources alone, Ethiopia pledged to cut emissions 14% below business as usual by 2030 – which would see emissions increase slightly compared to 2010. The calculations are based on a revised 2010 baseline, which reflects updated economic and emissions data.

After livestock, the land-use and forestry sector is the second largest source of emissions in Ethiopia and provides the largest potential for emissions reductions. 

By restoring 5 million hectares of forests and reforesting 3 million hectares of land by 2030, the government hopes to turn the sector from a source of emissions into a carbon sink – reducing the sector’s emissions by 171% compared with business as usual projections for 2030. 

The plan was developed on the country’s 10-year development plan finalised in 2020 and its Climate Resilience and Green Economy Strategy.

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Commissioner Beyene told Climate Home the document “isn’t just a political statement, it’s a technically sound plan”.

With nearly 80% of the population living in rural areas as smallholder farmers, livestock is mainly used a means of livelihood in Ethiopia. Cattle and beef are exported to neighbouring countries, bringing cash income to farmers and pastoralists for whom keeping live animals is also a sign of social prestige, Beyene said.

“It’s also about shifting the culture from keeping large animals to small animals,” he said, adding that implementing the measure will require engagement with communities, adequate market infrastructure for farmers and incentives that will be piloted on small-scale projects.

“People don’t want to move away from the status quo unless there is a proven opportunity,” he said.

Cynthia Elliott, of the Global Climate Programme at the World Resources Institute, which supported a consortium of consultants to help the government update its climate plan, told Climate Home that given Ethiopia’s limited resources, the government has shown “tremendous ambition”.

She described measures to shift from beef to poultry as “still a bit exploratory”, with the details to be worked out.

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For Simon Addison, of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), promoting the diversification of the livestock sector may do more to help the country adapt to climate impacts than cut emissions.

“If you are looking at this as a measure to increase production and market value of the livestock sector and increase its resilience by diversifying the animal mix, this offers quite a reasonable strategy,” he said. “I am not sure it’s such a good way to deal with the mitigation side as it massively increases the scale of the livestock sector.”

Sheep and goats, which browse on bushes and shrubs, are relatively resilient to the droughts that are becoming more frequent in the Horn of Africa because of climate change. Cattle need more water and access to green pasture.

Pastoralists affected by drought or conflict that have lost their livestock or access to grasslands are increasingly looking to poultry as an alternative livelihood. “Poultry can be a good option for those who are no longer mobile,” Addison said.” It is possible to produce quite intensively, with little capital and it has a high market value.”

Although there already is a significant shift towards diversifying livestock among pastoralists, the measure could be seen as a top-down “imposition of maladaptive measures” from the government onto communities that want to continue mobile beef production, Addison warned. This could have “serious implications for cultural norms, social capital and social dynamics among mobile pastoralists,” he said.

Through holistic rangeland management, mobile pastoralism can also help sequester carbon in the soil and improve rangeland health, he added.

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And the share of agriculture in the GDP is predicted to fall by nearly half between 2011 and 2030, while construction and services are expected to drive economic growth, with urbanisation and industry increasing emissions.

Carley Reynolds, a climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics, told Climate Home energy emissions are low in Ethiopia with more than 95% of power generated from renewables, overwhelmingly hydropower. “The challenge will be to keep its power system clean… and avoid investing in fossil fuels” as electricity access increases, she said.

Under the plan, Ethiopia aims for 100% of households that aren’t connected to the grid to use off-grid renewable electricity for lighting by 2030 – up from 40% currently.

The post Ethiopia to shift from beef to chicken production under updated climate plan appeared first on Climate Home News.

“The farm I had called home for nearly 30 years was completely submerged, I was in shock and afraid. For two weeks I walked by the roadside speaking to myself,” Yator told Climate Home News. “Questions ran through my mind without answers. How will my children survive? Where do I resettle? It was a difficult time.”

Yator is not the only Kenyan farmer to suffer from severe depression and anxiety. Kenya is facing a mental health crisis, triggered, in part, by climate change. Many sufferers told Climate Home News that losses caused by drought, flooding and other extreme weather contributed to their distress.

According to the World Health Organization, Kenya ranks fourth in Africa for the most number of mental health cases, with 1.9 million people, 4.4% of the population suffering from depression. In June 2020, the government declared a mental health emergency after a recommendation by a task force.

Yator received no psychological support and turned to prayer to cope. Now, a year later, she sustains her family as a fishmonger in Kambi ya Samaki area, along the shores of Lake Baringo. While looking for work, Yator relied on friends and well wishers for financial support.

“When I was at my farm, I had water, firewood all from my farm. Today, I cannot afford to pay my daughter’s university fees – something I did at ease with the farm produce,” she said.

Pauline Yator started working as a fishmonger after she lost her farm to flooding last year. Photo: Sophie Mbugua

Heavy rainfall in 2019 and 2020 amplified the swelling of the lakes in Kenya’s Rift Valley, displacing more than 5,000 people, Samuel Mutai, director of Baringo county’s meteorological department, told Climate Home News.

As a result, 150 households live in tents an abandoned airstrip while thousands of others depend on strangers, relatives, and friends for shelter, he said.

Homes, schools, roads, health centres, and farmlands were submerged. In November 2019 at least 120 people died and 18,000 were displaced by floods and landslides in Kenya, according to the United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

The Baringo county deputy governor Jacob Chepkwony told Climate Home News that 3,087 households were displaced after flooding damaged their homesteads. More than 85 are disabled and older people, and overall damage to housing and shelter is estimated at 1.2 billion Kenyan shillings ($11m), he said.

Africa accounts for only 2–3% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy and industrial sources. Data analysis shows that the one billion people who live in sub-Saharan Africa are responsible for just 0.55% of global emissions.

But despite its tiny contribution to global warming, cyclones, landslides, droughts and floods are becoming more intense and frequent in this region. The western part of the Indian ocean is warming faster than any other part of the tropical ocean while temperatures are rising 1.5 times faster in the Sahel than the global average, said Abubakar Salih Babiker, a climate scientist at the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center (ICPAC).

Babiker told the Climate Home News that extreme events such as floods, droughts, and landslides are happening faster than the community’s ability to recover from previous natural disasters.

“Over the last 30 years, the minimum temperatures in most parts of East Africa have increased by 1.2C and the maximum by about 2C, higher than the lower target of the Paris Agreement, said Babiker.

Jeremiah Cheptirim, a 76-year-old father of seven, stands in front of his house destroyed by flooding from Lake Baringo, Kenya (Photo: Sophie Mbugua)

Yator is not the only one whose life was turned upside down by natural disasters.

Jeremiah Cheptirim, a 76-year-old father of seven, from Ng’enyin village has been displaced three times since 2018, when his 30-acre farm was entirely submerged. His 71-year-old wife, Targok Bartogos, and five grandchildren have been squatting in a tent at the edge of their neighbour’s land. Bartogos cannot sleep at night.

“It’s too cold at night. Questions run through my mind wondering when we will manage a decent house. The hippopotamus defecates outside the tent every night. I have grandchildren in this tent, what if some day it decided to attack?” said Bartogos.

Over the years, Cheptirim has lost 30 cows, 16 goats, and 24 sheep to pneumonia and crocodiles.

Shadrack Chalo from Garashi village in coastal Kenya supported his six children through farming. His village has experienced drought since 2019, but the river flooded following heavy rains upstream and broke its banks.

“The floods destroyed my farm, carried away the generators, the irrigation pipe, and all other farming equipment I had bought. Due to lost income, I had to transfer my children to public schools.

“The problem was – where do you start? It takes time to plant and wait for the coconut trees and bananas to mature and earn you money. When all these trees die suddenly, the entire farm is destroyed, all cows are dead overnight from floods, and given some of us are old without the energy to start over, stress and death are inevitable for most of the farmers. Stress is our biggest challenge,” Chalo said.

Jeremiah Cheptirim and his wife Targok Bartogos sit outside the tent they have been living in since their house was flooded. Photo: Sophie Mbugua

In December 2019 the Kenyan government established a task force on mental health. Its review found out that of all medical patients at least 25% of outpatients and 40% of inpatients suffer from a mental illness. Climate change is identified as a contributing factor to mental illness, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kenya is not the only African country with a heavy mental health burden. In Nigeria, Health Think Analytics says 7 million inhabitants suffer from depression. WHO estimates that while 650,000 Ghanaians have a severe mental disorder, a further 2.1 million suffer from a moderate to mild mental illness.

In Ethiopia, a national health survey on depression identified that 9.1% of the population suffers from depression.

“Mental health issues are often forgotten amid the other life-threatening disasters like coronavirus, storms, droughts, and floods,” Boniface Chitayi, a consultant psychiatrist with the ministry of health and president of the Kenyan psychiatrist association, told Climate Home News.

Chitayi said events such as loss of property, loved ones, job loss, and forced migration, tend to cause higher rates of depression, and anxiety.

“Stressful events can trigger most serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, substance use and abuse as a way of coping with increased stress,” Chitayi said.

The task force on mental health report shows that 75% of Kenyans cannot access mental health care. Kenya has only 71 psychiatrists for almost 50 million people, despite the large number of mental health cases in the country. Nigeria has fewer than 300 psychiatrists for an estimated population of over 200 million.

Elias Fondo, the Kilifi County mental health clinical officer, told Climate Home News that only about 22 out of 47 counties offer mental health services. As a result, access to mental health services is a constraint for most Kenyans who either cannot afford or travel long distances in search of assistance. Fondo said most mental health cases are often misdiagnosed due to lack of specialists.

Sidi Toya from Kilifi County said since the floods, her two children wake up screaming at night. Over the years, their school grades, and ability to respond to the teacher’s questions have worsened.

“Before the flooding, they would sleep soundly uninterrupted at night. We have gone to the hospitals seeking professional help, but the medics say the children are not sick. As parents, we do not know what to do next. We are not able to seek help beyond this village,” said Toya.

Countries like Kenya do not have a separate budget for mental health.

“Mental disorders account for at least 13% of all diseases but its allocation has been 0.1% of the entire budget. Counties in Kenya are not fully sensitised about mental health and their role. As temperatures and mental illnesses rise, Kenya needs a mental health budget that is separate from the overall health budget whose percentage reflects the burden of mental health illness in our country,” said Chitayi.

Cheptirim is planning to relocate his family again. He has identified a piece of land on a safer ground but has no financial means to construct a house. He depends on friends to raise over 300,000 shillings ($3,000) to build the house and relocate.

“I have managed to purchase land in a safer ground, but I have nothing left to build. I have talked to a few friends hoping someone with a soft heart can help with whatever amount they can manage. My only wish is to get my family to safety and warmth,” he said.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.

The post Flooding and drought fuels mental health crisis in Kenya appeared first on Climate Home News.

The World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) are pleading for help from the international community, warning that 14,000 people are facing famine and that “lives are at stake as hunger tightens its grip” in the region.

For the first time since a methodology to rank food security threats was introduced in 2016, people have been recorded in the “catastrophe” category – the highest level of the five-step scale describing people who have exhausted their coping strategies.

In the space of a few months, the situation has worsened “in an exponential manner,” Theodore Mbainaissem, head of WFP’s Ambovombe office, in southern Madagascar, told Climate Home News. The future looks “even more catastrophic,” he added.

Swathes of the population on the island’s most southern areas have resorted to eating insects, wild roots, and a mixture of white clay with tamarind juice, he said.

“These are foods that are not at all nutritious but people are eating them just to fill them up and not die of hunger,” Mbainaissem said.

The crisis is hitting children hardest, who are not getting the necessary nutrients to develop properly. In some villages, dozens of deaths have been recorded, Mbainaissem added.

Children eat food distributed by the World Food Programme in the village of Sihanamaro, Androy region, southern Madagascar (Photo: WFP/Krystyna Kovalenko)

Five of the last six years have seen below average rainfall in the southern tip of the country. The severity of the current drought has not been seen since 1981 and has been building over the last three years.

This year’s harvest of crops such as rice, maize, cassava and pulses is expected to be less than half the five-year average, according to the WFP and FAO.

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Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events in Madagascar, such as droughts in the southwest and cyclones in the south east of the country.

Projections show the south of the country is most vulnerable to rising temperatures, reduced rainfall in the dry season and increased variability in the distribution of rainfall – a combination that adds to food security challenges.

Dried out rice fields in the Anosy region of southern Madagascar (Photo: Daniel Wood/SEED Madagascar)

In the district of Amboasary Atsimo, where three quarters of the population are lacking food, 27% of people suffer from acute malnutrition – “alarming” levels that are already causing “irreversible damage to children” the WFP and FAO have said.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification expects the number of people in the “catastrophe” category to double during the lean season between October and December, when food stocks are usually low. The number of people experiencing acute food security could reach nearly half of the Grand South region of Madagascar’s 2.7 million people.

“We are going to have to multiply our plea for help so that the international community turns its attention to what is happening in the south of Madagascar because we have the impression that this crisis has been forgotten,” Mbainaissem said.

A member of the World Food Programme helps a malnourished woman eat emergency food in Sihanamaro, Androy region, southern Madagascar (Photo: WFP/Krystyna Kovalenko)

Madagascar has among the highest poverty rates in the world and ranked as the fourth most vulnerable nation to climate impacts in the 2020 Global Climate Risk Index.

Around 80% of its 28 million people live in rural areas. Most people in the south of the country depend on rain-fed, small-scale agriculture to survive.

In the past year, streams, rivers and small dams built for irrigation have dried up. Those who were able to plant cassava and potatoes are digging them up early, desperate for food or an income as prices on the market soar. In some areas, locust invasion has destroyed fields of maize.

A dried up river in Ambandrika village, southern Madagascar (Photo: Daniel Wood/ SEED Madagascar)

Years of deforestation and soil erosion have sped up the desertification of land which once produced food. Earlier this year, unprecedented sandstorms swept across large areas of agricultural land, covering fields in sand and stopping seeds from growing – a phenomenon that affected much smaller areas in the past.

Drier soils and higher temperatures caused by climate change, coupled with deforestation, could have contributed to the event, experts say.

Women collecting food in southern Madagascar (Photo: Patrick Razafindrainibe/SEED Madagascar)

Since October, the government and the WFP have distributed food, largely rice, pulses and vegetable oil, to around 750,000 people as well as therapeutic food to address malnutrition in children and pregnant women.

But Mbainaissem said the resources of UN agencies did not meet the growing demand for assistance at a time when the delivery of humanitarian aid is being delayed by Covid-19 restrictions and the halt of all flights into the country.

The WFP has called on the international community to mobilise $74 million to avert a disaster over the next six months.

“We are between the devil and the deep blue sea now,” said Sylvestre Mbola, of the development charity Seed Madagascar, which is raising funds to distribute food in rural villages in the Anosy region.

“People in other places only have one enemy which is just Covid-19 while here in Anosy, we have both Covid-19 and famine as enemies,” he said.

Lisa Bass, director of programmes and operations at Seed Madagascar, told Climate Home the international community had long overlooked Madagascar’s development challenges, making it much harder to secure funds from donors in time of crisis.

More resources are needed to allow the government and donors to articulate “a long-term strategy across the whole of south [of the country] that really targets climate adaptation and supports communities”, she said, rather than focusing on short-term projects.

An empty market in southern Madagascar (Photo: Tsiraiky Rossizela/SEED Madagascar)

For the FAO, adaptation means developing more climate-resilient agricultural livelihoods. Together with the Malagasy government, the FAO has supported around 20,000 farming families in the region by providing fast-growing vegetable seed packs and training in drought-resilient farming strategies.

“Agroecology is key,” Andriamparany Ranoasy, director of the national farmers’ confederation Fifata, told Climate Home.

Identifying areas where irrigation could be developed, rolling out nutritious and drought-tolerant crops such as sorghum and some varieties of sweet potato, and reforesting areas to increase water retention in soils will be necessary to improve resilience, he said.

But even measures like these might not be enough to compensate for insufficient yields across the region, Ranoasy warned. “If the drought continues in the next few years, we will be forced to transfer some population away from the worst affected areas.”

In recent months, thousands of people have left their rural communities and migrated to towns, looking for work and food. “That is very concerning. Those arriving in cities are already very weak and if there is no work, it risks sparking insecurity,” Ranoasy said.

Instead, he believes the government should start identifying areas where people from the south could resettled and cultivate the land. “We should have a managed migration and a real politic of access to agricultural land.”

The post Southern Madagascar at risk of famine amid worst drought in 40 years appeared first on Climate Home News.

The proposed law would commit Ireland to cutting its emissions by 51% between 2018 and 2030 and to net zero no later than 2050. Government is pushing it through parliament as priority legislation.

The country’s environment minister Eamon Ryan previously said Ireland would match EU emissions targets. EU environment ministers continue to push for a 2030 reduction target of at least 55% from 1990 levels.

Ireland’s 2030 goal works out at a 45% reduction if the baseline is set t0 1990, according to campaign group Friends of the Irish Environment.

Ireland formed a three-party coalition government in June, including the Republican party Fianna Fáil, the more liberal Fine Gael party and the Green Party. The coalition agreed to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by an average 7% per year, in line with Paris Agreement commitments. 

The bill was first presented in December to the country’s committee on climate action, which suggested 78 recommendations to the draft legislation after hearing expert testimony. The strengthened bill was approved by the coalition this week. 

The new law will require the government to adopt a series of five-year carbon budgets across all sectors over the next 15 years. Ministers will be required to appear before a climate committee each year to report on how individual sectors have performed. Ireland will introduce its first carbon budget later this year.

Scientists push to add “huge” fish trawling emissions to national inventories

Sectors such as transport and agriculture will require significant reform if they are to halve their emissions by 2030. Agriculture accounts for 33% of Ireland’s carbon emissions and is especially challenging to reform given the high methane output of livestock farming. 

Micheál Martin, Ireland’s prime minister, or Taoiseach, warned this week that “there will be difficult annual phases of engagement with different stakeholders”. 

“But by hard-wiring it into legislation we do create an added imperative to drive change”, Martin said.

One contentious issue is the scale of beef and dairy farming.

Green leader and environment minister Eamon Ryan said that farmers would play an important role in the transition to net zero, adding there would be fewer cattle in future but farmers would earn more for their product.

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However, Martin said his focus was on “stabilising the herd number” rather than reducing it. Ireland’s deputy prime minister Leo Varadkar said it would be difficult to lower emissions without reducing the size of the herd.

Climate groups welcomed the approval of the new bill, describing the proposed legislation as a “historic moment” for Irish climate action. 

“This climate bill is a big step in the right direction. The first draft had too many loopholes. Now, the targets are tighter, the duty to act is stronger, and the language is clearer,” Friends of the Earth director Oisín Coghlan said. 

Last year the Irish Supreme Court ruled that the government’s emissions mitigation strategy fell “well short” of what was needed to meet the country’s climate commitments and ordered it to draw up a more ambitious plan. 

The post Ireland’s government agrees on climate bill to set 2050 net zero goal in law appeared first on Climate Home News.

The “farm to fork” strategy aims to reduce the use of synthetic fertilisers, which release greenhouse gases, at least 20% by 2030. US government analysis published in November said this would lead to a 12% decline in agricultural output by 2030 and a 17% increase in food prices, costing the EU economy $71 billion.

Environmentalists dispute the Trump study’s conclusions and describe the impact assessment as a “delay and derail” tactic pushed by the powerful European farming lobby.

Spain’s agriculture minister Luis Planas told Monday’s EU council meeting that the US Agriculture Department’s (USDA) report put him “in a rather invidious position, where there were opposition MPs asking questions using USDA documents to ask me questions about what we were doing”.

He continued: “Our document, I’m sure will be much more rigorous, much more in-depth and much more useful but, you know Commissioner, it would have been nice to have it now or as soon as possible. It would help us greatly in our ability to roll out our national plans.”

His call was echoed by ministers from Austria, Ireland, Germany and France. The French agriculture minister Julien Denormandie complained: “We can only base ourselves on impact assessments which came from the US.”

Scientists push to add “huge” fish trawling emissions to national inventories

Agriculture commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski said: “We are preparing impact assessments. The whole of the Commission is working on this. We have an expert team which is doing this work. As soon as the document is ready, we will make it available.”

Campaigners accused the politicians of bowing to pressure from the Copa-Cogeca European farming trade association. Its secretary-general Pekka Pesonen said last week that pursuing green reforms without an impact assessment leaves farmers waiting like “animals to be slaughtered”.

WWF policy officer Jabier Ruiz said this was a “delay and derail strategy used by some agriculture stakeholders who don’t like the targets”.

Impact assessments are not necessary for “farm to fork” because it is a strategy rather than binding legislation, said Ruiz, adding that impact assessments on measures like pesticide reduction are already planned.

Harriet Bradley, policy officer at the NGO Birdlife, said the USDA’s study was “unrigorous” and had been criticised by analysts. Yelto Zimmer, of the Institute for Farm Economics, said it was “very pessimistic”.

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Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue used the study to back up his claim that the EU was basing its strategy “more on political science than demonstrated agricultural science”. Writing in the EU Observer, he said: “Europe has forgotten the ‘farm’ in ‘farm to fork’”.

But Bradley said the study focused on the ways the reforms would threaten food production and ignored the ways they would increase it. For example, using less pesticide would mean more bees pollinating crops, she said. The Commission’s study should be more balanced than the US one, she said.

Marco Contiero, Greenpeace Europe’s agriculture officer, added that climate change was already impacting food yields, particularly in Southern Europe. So farmers opposing climate action is “counter-productive”, he said.

Commissioner Wojciechowski recognised some of these difficulties. He told ministers: “It’s hard to gauge what the possible negative influence might be. For example, if we reduce fertilisers then there will be an effect on yields and it will affect farmers’ income. On the other hand, we have precision farming. We will use less fertiliser but in a more precise manner. So it’s difficult to decide which way this will go.”

The European Commission’s website says many European regions are already facing more frequent, severe, and longer lasting droughts. These have knock-on effects on agriculture like reducing water levels, stunting tree and crop growth, increasing pest attacks and fueling wildfires, the website says.

Temperature rises are likely to increase pest numbers and invasive species and reduce the yields of agriculture and livestock, the EU adds, and sea level rises will “lead to much more saltwater intrusion into bodies of fresh water, affecting agriculture and the supply of drinking water”.

The post EU ministers demand response to Trump Admin critique of green farming reforms appeared first on Climate Home News.

South Sudanese officials hope the world’s newest country can become carbon neutral by 2030, with a rollout of renewable energy and mass tree planting. But aid cuts, a slump in oil revenue and the legacy of civil war pose major hurdles to decarbonisation.

A draft plan seen by Climate Home News, which government aims to submit to the UN in early summer, hinges on international support. Of the estimated $100 billion cost by 2030, 90% would need to come from external sources.

“We are trying to be carbon neutral by 2030. If we have the funds, we will be able to make it happen. If the funds are not there, we will be looking at 2050,” South Sudan’s lead climate negotiator Joseph Bartel told Climate Home News from sweltering Juba, where temperature had risen above 40C.

“This country is really suffering from the impacts of climate change and we need to make sure that we are making our contribution to save our planet from this existential threat,” he said.

The draft plan shows quantifiable emissions reductions goals in seven sectors, including agriculture, transport, waste, energy and forestry, as well as emissions intensity targets for the oil industry. There is no explicit analysis of whether these add up to net zero emissions.

It includes developing nearly 3,000MW of hydropower projects, installing wind turbines, rolling out decentralised solar power and promoting biogas. In forestry, the plan is to plant 100 million trees over ten years, and sequester 45 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030 by reducing deforestation.

To adapt to intensifying heat and rainfall extremes, there are proposals to develop drought- and flood-resilient seeds, promote wetland management and diversify livelihoods away from subsistence farming.

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The UK host to the critical Cop26 climate talks scheduled to take place in Glasgow, in November, is slashing overseas development assistance from 0.7% to 0.5% of its national income.

Leaked documents from the UK’s foreign and development office obtained by openDemocracy show cuts are being planned across some of Africa’s most fragile states and climate vulnerable nations.

In South Sudan, UK aid could fall by nearly 60%, dropping from £110 million ($152m) in 2020-21 to just £45m in 2021-22.

Among the UK’s ongoing projects in the country is a seven-year programme to provide humanitarian assistance and build resilience to shocks from conflicts, droughts and flooding.

Bartel described the reported decision as “depressing” and “unwise”. “The humanitarian situation is dire,” he said, warning the UK was sending “the wrong signal” ahead of the climate summit and he hoped the government would reconsider.

“This trend of cutting aid and not getting to the $100bn [by 2020 pledged by rich governments in 2009] show we are on a very slippery slope. If we are not careful, we will fail to tackle climate change in countries like ours,” Bartel said.

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With oil exports providing up to 80% of government revenues, the collapse in oil price induced by the pandemic sent the economy into “tailspin” said Bartel. Many civil servants in the country haven’t been paid for months.

Following South Sudan’s independence in 2011, the nation of 11 million people entered a six- year civil war that killed an estimated 400,000 people and displaced millions. It came to an official end when a peace agreement was signed in February 2020.

The nation is struggling to rebuild fragile political institutions. While a transitional coalition government was formed last year, parliament hasn’t been re-constituted since the peace deal was signed.

In a symptom of the instability, the country’s parliament ratified the Paris Agreement in 2017 but nobody sent the paperwork to the UN until last month.

South Sudan is among the most rapidly warming countries in the world, as average temperatures increased by 1-1.5C across large parts of the country in the last 60 years. It contributed 0.07% of global emissions in 2015.

Severe droughts followed by unpredictable and intense rainfall periodically destroy crops, in a country where the majority of the population is dependent on subsistence farming.

According to the World Food Programme, 60% of the population, or about seven million people are struggling to find enough food each day.

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In October 2020, floods displaced tens of thousands of people. Months later, 96,000 people are still living in camps and flooding is ongoing in the worst-affected areas, Payai John, climate change director in South Sudan’s government, told Climate Home.

Repeated flooding has heightened conflict in some parts of the country, where farmers and pastoralists are competing for shrinking land for grazing, he said.

A flooded displacement camp in Bor, Jonglei state, in eastern South Sudan. (Photo: UNMISS/Flickr)

“The priority should be adaptation, adaptation and adaptation,” Nhial Tiitmamer, of the Sudd Institut in Juba, told Climate Home. “The international community should pay more attention to the climate crisis in South Sudan.”

The government has identified 28 adaptation projects that would strengthen communities’ resilience but only three have secured funding from the Green Climate Fund and the Least Developed Countries Fund.

“We cannot increase ambition when the funding is being reduced,” said John. “How will the UK Cop26 presidency mobilise funding when it is cutting its own?”

A spokesperson for the UK government said: “The seismic impact of the pandemic on the UK economy has forced us to take tough but necessary decisions, including temporarily reducing the overall amount we spend on aid. We are still working through what this means for individual programmes and decisions have not yet been made.”

The post South Sudan plans to raise climate ambition amid ‘dire’ humanitarian crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

Farmers from the northern states of Punjab and Haryana are demanding the government repeals laws passed in September that introduced market reforms on the sale of crops. They have organised a nationwide protest on 6 February, when they plan to barricade major highways for several hours. In recent weeks tensions have escalated, with violent clashes between police and farmers.

The government says the new agricultural laws will enable farmers to set their own prices and sell their crops to large companies, such as supermarket chains — doing away with government-regulated wholesale markets where farmers are guaranteed a minimum price.

Changing weather patterns, coupled with unsustainable practices, have led to failed harvests and shrinking incomes for millions of families across the country.

The protestors fear government reforms will allow companies to drive down prices, making it even harder for them to make a living. 

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Agriculture is the primary livelihood for around 58% of India’s 1.3 billion population. The average annual income of a farming family in over half of India’s states was a mere 20,000 rupees ($271) in 2016, according to an economic survey.

“Farming has become a loss-making proposition. As a result farmers who provide for the entire nation are heavily indebted. Not only are they at the mercy of banks and loan sharks, but also the vagaries of weather and the market,” the All India Kisan Sangharsh Committee, which represents over 150 farming unions, said in a statement.

Climate change has made rainfall increasingly erratic.

“Weather patterns are changing and the monsoon is becoming more unpredictable,” Debajit Palit, a director for rural energy at The Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi, told Climate Home News. “You used to know how much rain would happen on a given day. Now it suddenly rains so much that there is a flood.”

A 2017 study published in the journal Nature found that extreme rainfall events tripled between 1950 and 2015 — a trend that scientists have linked to global warming. Charity Christian Aid estimated intense flooding in India between June and October 2020 cost $10 billion.

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Unpredictable weather patterns have forced farmers to delay their harvests, bore deeper into the ground to extract water and intensify their use of toxic fertilisers, said Palit. 

In Punjab, known as India’s “bread basket”, farmers have access to free electricity to pump water for irrigation. Without having to bear the cost of energy, they have dug deeper into the water table.

An electricity cap could incentivise farmers to use energy more efficiently and diversify their harvests beyond water-draining crops such as rice and sugarcane, said Palit.

“When the farmers start paying, they will start valuing the electricity,” he said, adding that farmers should receive welfare benefits in return. 

Switching to less water-intensive crops such as maize and millet is the only way to reverse the damage and create a more sustainable agricultural system, Palit added. India’s ministry of agriculture has previously identified pulses and oilseeds as alternatives to the common rice-wheat cropping system.

“It will be best for farmers and the environment as a whole to shift away from paddy cultivation to other high value crops,” he said. 

Crop diversification would also solve the issue of stubble burning, which farmers do to quickly clear the soil for the next growing season. Farmers in northern India burn an estimated 23 million tonnes of straw from their rice harvests every year, according to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana shrouded Delhi in smog in recent years, sparking a public health emergency.

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Youth climate activists from around the world have expressed their support for Indian farmers on social media. 

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg wrote on Twitter: “We stand in solidarity with the #FarmersProtest in India.” She shared a “toolkit” of advice to those taking part in the protests. 

I still #StandWithFarmers and support their peaceful protest.
No amount of hate, threats or violations of human rights will ever change that. #FarmersProtest

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) February 4, 2021

Ugandan youth activist Vanessa Nakate also spoke out in support of the protests. 

The people united will never be defeated #FarmersProtest

— Vanessa Nakate (@vanessa_vash) February 3, 2021

Earlier this week Delhi authorities imposed a 48-hour internet shutdown in response to the farmers’ protests. 

US vice-president Kamala Harris’ niece, Meena Harris, condemned the standoff between police and farmers on Twitter. 

“We all should be outraged by India’s internet shutdowns and paramilitary violence against farmer protesters,” she said. 

Meanwhile in the UK, farming union the Landworkers’ Alliance wrote a public letter, calling on the government to support Indian farmers by banning the export of pesticides and engaging directly with farming unions in India.

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The report by the Climate Change Commission said the country was set to miss its long-term goal by 6.3 million tonnes of CO2, roughly the emissions of Paraguay or 13% of New Zealand’s current emissions.

The commission said New Zealand’s 2030 target of reducing its net emissions by 30% from 2005 levels was “not compatible with global efforts” to limit global warming to 1.5C – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.

To align with a 1.5C pathway, the report said New Zealand should cut emissions by “much more than 35%”. The commission chair Rod Carr said the advisers will now consult New Zealanders on “whether they think ‘much more than 35%’ is 38% or 42%”.

According to Climate Action Tracker, New Zealand should reduce emissions by at least 44% between 2005 and 2030 to do its fair share to keep the world within 1.5C of warming. To be considered a “role model”, it should aim for at least 70% of emissions cuts. These figures do not include land use, land use change and forestry.

A recent Oxfam report said that, to do its fair share, New Zealand should reduce emissions between 67% and 102% by 2030 – depending on the methodology used.

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Prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who commissioned the report, said the government would revise its 2030 target. The government’s response is expected in November 2021, ahead of Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK.

#breaking The @ClimateCommNZ draft advice to Govt says:
Emission targets are achievable
Meeting them will make our communities cleaner & healthier
We have the tech, just need to get it in place
We are not on track, but can be if we act now
Next 5 yrs are crucial

— James Shaw (@jamespeshaw) January 31, 2021

Professor Bronwyn Hayward, who researches environmental policy at the University of Canterbury, called for urgency, tweeting: “We’ve had 30 (nearer 40) years of climate inaction by successive governments-so I’m underwhelmed to hear there will be a year for government to respond to #nzpol climate report-then presumably a year to implement action on the ground- let’s move faster!”

Nearly half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, according to government data, with methane from livestock accounting for almost three quarters of the sector’s emissions.

To align with a 1.5C pathway, agricultural methane emissions would need to be cut by 11-30% by 2030 and 24-47% by 2050, the commission said. It found this could be achieved by adopting “farm management practices” that reduce the amount of animal feed being used.

Technological solutions such as selective breeding and the use of chemical compounds in feed to inhibit cattle’s methane production could help make “significant contributions to global emissions reductions,” the report said.

Greenpeace New Zealand campaigner Steve Abell said that although he welcomed much of the report, the section on dairy “seems more anxious about maintaining the status quo than biting the bullet in the existential crisis of our time”.

“It effectively says ‘we can only save the planet so long as we don’t have to produce one kilo less milk or meat by 2035’. That ain’t transformation,” he said.

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The report called for the food processing sector to stop using coal boilers by 2037 and to use biofuel or biomass instead. The dairy industry currently burns coal to dry milk into powder, where heat from biomass and electricity could be used instead.

Cindy Baxter, of Coal Action Network Aotearoa, said the 2037 deadline “should be brought forward”. “The world needs to get out of coal,” she said.

Baxter welcomed the commission’s recommendation that the 500 MW gas and coal-fired Huntly power station should shut down “in the 2020s”.

She added all coal mining in New Zealand should end by 2027 and the proposed expansion of the Canterbury Coal mine outside Christchurch, which produces low sulphur coal for the dairy industry, should be blocked.

The commission urged the government to set emissions reductions goals that it can meet with domestic action. Buying emissions reductions achieved overseas through carbon markets should only be used as a “last resort” in response to an unforeseen disaster, it said. For example, if a fire destroyed the country’s power lines, forcing it to turn back to fossil fuels temporarily.

The report said that while forests “have a role to play” the country “can’t plant our way out of climate change”. Instead, it must focus on reducing emissions at the source.

This article was amended to clarify that Huntly uses both gas and coal rather than just coal.

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With more than half of its territory covered by tropical forests, Colombia has made halting deforestation and restoring nearly one million hectares of forested ecosystems a pillar of its plan to cut emissions 51% from a business-as-usual baseline by 2030.

The new and tougher target announced at the end of 2020 and in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic is a significant hike from Colombia’s previous 20% target.

It was set following extensive intra-governmental and public consultation and aims to establish carbon budgets from 2023 and put the country on a path to carbon neutrality by 2050 .

“In order to comply with those commitments, we definitely need to protect the Amazon and fight deforestation,” Colombian president Iván Duque Márquez told Reuters Next conference this week, calling for a nature-based approach to addressing climate change.

But the task at hand is enormous. Deforestation accounts for around a quarter of Colombia’s total emissions. The 2016 peace agreement which ended more than 50 years of civil war between the government and the rebel group Farc led to a spike in forest clearance.

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During the conflict, the Farc operated strict deforestation control to conceal guerilla movements in the forest and preserve their revenue streams from illegal mines and coca plantations, used to make cocaine.

After the group disarmed, illegal land grabbing for cattle ranching, timber or coca production surged in areas that are difficult to police.

Cielo Gomez grows coffee on her land in southeast of Nariño territory, Colombia. The land was restituted to her family by the government after being illegally occupied during the civil war (Photo: UN Women/Flickr)

Data from Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (Ideam), which monitors deforestation in the country, shows deforestation soared to its highest level in 2017 with 219,552 hectares of forest cleared – up from just under 124,000 in 2015.

“What is happening on the ground is not compatible with what Colombia has just committed to,” Estefania Ardila, country engagement specialist for Latin America at the NDC Partnership, which supports developing countries willing to raise their climate ambition, told Climate Home News.

“It’s ambitious. And it’s going to be tremendously difficult to achieve,” she said, describing development challenges with high levels of inequality and unemployment.

To design its climate goals, the government calculated the carbon budget it has to 2030 to stay on a pathway to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

“That requires that after 2030, we have no net deforestation,” Ivan Valencia, former coordinator of Colombia’s low-carbon strategy who led the mitigation side of the NDC update, now an independent consultant, told Climate Home.

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As a signatory to the New York Declaration on Forests, Colombia committed to halving natural forest loss in 2020 and net zero deforestation by 2030, which means any forest clearance needs to be offset by replanting native trees.

By 2019 deforestation levels had dropped to less than 160,000 hectares of land cleared that year. But 2020 goals were missed, as forest clearance nearly doubled in the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 2019.

To save carbon-rich forests and create jobs to reboot the economy from the pandemic, Colombia is working to provide alternative livelihoods for people who live in and around forests.

In its submission of its climate plan to the UN, measures to tackle deforestation account for a third of Colombia’s efforts to meet its 2030 goal. Together with ecosystems restoration, actions related to nature represent more than half of the country’s carbon-cutting effort.

“Unless Colombia complies with its deforestation target and pathway to achieve it, they will not be able to meet their [climate goal] and would have to make a gigantic effort in other sectors to compensate,” said Carolina Jaramillo, Colombia country representative for the Global Green Growth Institute.

Avoiding further deforestation and preserving forest ecosystems provides Colombia with some of the cheapest ways to reduce its emissions, Jaramillo told Climate Home.

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To achieve its goal, Colombia is planning to restore more than 960,000 hectares of land by 2030, plant 180 million trees by 2022 and reduce deforestation by 50,000 hectare per year from a business as usual baseline by 2030.

Additional emissions reductions from reduced deforestation could be sold as credits under the carbon market mechanism established by the Paris Agreement and help to finance other carbon-cutting measures, the plan states.

Financial incentives are being created for farmers to restore ecosystems that store more carbon by raising livestock more efficiently so they need less grazing land, for example.

Agroforestry initiatives for coffee and cocoa production and the development of sustainable forest plantation for timber are among others.

La Chorrera indigenous community and WWF-Colombia, conduct an ecosystem service assessment of the forest surrounding in the Predio Putumayo Indigenous Reserve to help protect it (Photo:
Luis Barreto / WWF-UK)

A recent government strategy for deforestation control supports increasing production of non-timber products, such as natural rubber, fruits and seeds, to protect forests while diversifying the country’s income stream away from a dependence on oil exports and mining revenues.

The development of a bio-economy, which adds value to natural products for medicinal or cosmetic purposes for example, could contribute up to 10% to Colombia’s GDP by 2030 up from less than 1% currently, Jaramillo said.

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“How are we going to finance all this in the Covid context? That remains a big challenge,” said Valencia, adding that not all measures had guaranteed funding, leaving a role for the private sector.

And the cost of addressing deforestation will be “difficult to meet” without international cooperation.

In recent years, Norway, Germany and the UK have been supporting Colombia’s efforts to end deforestation through a payment-by-results scheme, under which it received $85 million since 2015. The partnership was renewed in 2019 with a commitment from European countries for an additional $366m to be paid by 2025 for achieving deforestation reduction targets and to implement policies.

“We need to call the whole world to protect that lung of humanity,” Duque said this week about the Amazon, calling for global cooperation in findings ways to finance forest protection through carbon credits and private sector involvement.

While the focus has been put on preserving and restoring Colombia’s forests, campaigners have accused the government of being inconsistent when it comes to its energy policy.

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President Duque promised a recovery package to Covid-19 that focuses on the energy transition, clean growth and environmental protection – but measures include ‘greening’ the fossil fuel industry with no plans for its managed phase-out.

So far, the country has spent $374million on supporting fossil fuels and just $4.4million on clean energy as part of its recovery, according to the Energy Policy Tracker.

This includes measures to reduce fugitive emissions in the oil sector and improve energy efficiency in refineries. Reeling from a fall in global oil prices, Colombia is turning its attention to fracking to plug a revenue shortfall. The labour ministry has been tasked to present a transition strategy for workers in fossil fuel sectors by 2023.

Santiago Aldana, a climate campaigner based in Bogotá and member of the advocacy group Climalab, welcomed his government’s ambition on cutting emissions, while improving livelihoods and preserving ecosystems.

But he warned the recovery package had exposed “inconsistencies” between the economic strategy and Colombia’s climate ambition, with fracking likely to further increase the country’s emissions.

“Climate action touches upon the most sensitive aspects of the country such as social inequality, poverty and violence,” Aldana told Climate Home. And to achieve its goal, the government will need to continue to engage with civil society to ensure social and climate justice, he said.

The post Colombia banks on forest economy to deliver climate ambition leap appeared first on Climate Home News.

With four children in tow and seven months pregnant, she returned to her father’s home, Namelok village in Kajiado, southern Kenya.

“I asked my father if I could get a portion of land to try farming and goat rearing. I needed financial means to feed, educate and care for my children,” Lasoi told Climate Home News. 

Lasoi’s father gave her access to two acres of land despite her brother’s objections. She could cultivate it, plant vegetables, rear her goats but not plant trees or make any long-term decisions without consulting her father.

But after years of farming, banks would not give Lasoi a loan for her business as she had no assets. “I thought of buying land but school fees and my children’s needs didn’t permit. I asked my father for at least a small portion of his 300 acres of land, but he was sceptical.”

It was only when she attended a training session on land rights by the Nasaru women’s group, which advocates for women to be included in decision-making, in 2016 that Lasoi learned she was legally entitled to own and manage land. 

“They told us that the constitutions and the laws in Kenya guaranteed women right to property. I did not know at that time” Lasoi says.

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Equipped with this knowledge, she convinced her father that she needed to own the piece of land she had been farming for years. 

About eight months ago, her father allocated her five acres of land as her inheritance, to which she now holds a title deed. 

“My father empowered me. I never thought I could own land after my divorce. I can finally plant trees and shield my goats from the heat, secure a loan, and sell if need be,” says Lasoi. “It’s priceless to finally make decisions over land.”

Alice Lasoi, pictured at the back, convinced her father to allocate her five acres of his land and use it to grow her own crops and rear goats to sell (All photos by Sophie Mbugua)

Owning land is key to helping women cope with the impacts of climate change, such as drought, and enables them to feed their families. 

In Kenya, Article 40 of the constitution guarantees a right to property for all. The Land Act, revised in 2016, requires spousal consent to sell land. The 2013 matrimonial property act allows women to register alongside their husbands for property acquired during marriage. The 2016 Community Land Act states that boys and girls above 18 years have a right to vote on community land decisions.

Regionally, the Africa Union, in its 2009 land declaration, recommends that its member states allocate at least 30% of land to women. Article 7 of the Maputo Protocol, the African Charter on human rights, grants both women and men rights to an equal share of joint property acquired during  marriage in the case of separation, divorce, or annulment.

“We have very beautiful pieces of legislation protecting women’s right to land in Kenya and in Africa but there is a big gap between policy and practice in many sub-Saharan countries. Since the colonial times, women have been excluded from land control and ownership. Our problem is enforcement,” Faith Alubbe, the chief executive officer at the Kenya Land Alliance, told Climate Home News.

It is difficult to enforce land ownership policies as rural women and community influencers are rarely included in drafting them, according to Evelyne Batamuliza, executive member of the African Development Bank Group’s Adaptation Benefits Mechanism.

“We move so fast in terms of making these laws but sometimes the people who these laws are made for do not know they exist as they never got a chance to participate,” Batamuliza tells Climate Home News, adding that land rights remains “a conversation among the elite in cities”.

Lorna Nashipei at her farm in southern Kenya where she manages her own plot of land and plants assorted vegetables

During the colonial era, the eldest male was registered as the family land administrator and no consideration was given to women. The male determined the rights of the women living in that homestead. In many African countries, the land laws are still colonially inclined.

“This generational exclusion of women on land has further affected their inclusion in community decisions to cope with droughts and floods [which are] becoming extreme and more frequent,” Juliana Rono, director of Nasaru Women’s Group, told Climate Home.

Since 2016, Rono has been working to build the resilience of about 150 women in dry areas of Kenya’s Kajiado county, with a climate adaptation grant, totalling 52 million Kenyan shillings ($466). The project was initially expected to run for three years, but has been extended for five years until June 2021. 

Rono says in her community, it was difficult for women to create alternative livelihoods as they do not own land.

“With the droughts and floods becoming frequent and severely disrupting pastoralism, it’s becoming critical to have an alternative livelihood to shield families from increasing poverty and malnutrition,” she says. 

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Pastor Stephen Saruni, a religious leader in Nameko, says frequent drought has driven men to sell their land. “Unfortunately, they sell without the wife’s knowledge, they relocate to towns, marry another woman leaving the wife and children in extreme poverty,” Saruni told Climate Home News.

According to the World Health Organization women and children are 14 times more likely to die when a natural disaster happens than men. 

Social norms demand women stay home to care for families while men leave for towns in search of jobs. Women and girls in poor countries spend 40 billion hours annually collecting water, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). 

According to Care International, women and girls make up 43% of the agricultural workforce in the global south. Women and girls from Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa, produce nearly 70% of the region’s food crops by volume. 

But despite this, less than 15% of women in sub-Saharan Africa have control over the land they farm, according to Batamuliza. A lack of land rights restricts women from making decisions about planting drought-resistant crops like sorghum or investing in alternative livelihoods like goat rearing, she says. 

In Kenya, the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) says women head about 32% of households, but individually hold only 1% of land titles. In 2018, an analysis by the Kenya Land Alliance found that out of the one million title deeds issued by the Kenyan government between 2013-2017, only 103,043 were given to women.

Mother-of-five Lorna Nashipei is working hard to overcome these societal barriers. Two years ago, the 38-year-old mother was surprised to meet a pastoralist woman growing and selling vegetables from her kitchen garden. 

“I was spending too much time travelling to the nearby town to purchase vegetables weekly. I spent 500 Kenyan Shillings ($4.50) on vegetables and transport. Yet I had five acres of land all left for cows and goats to roam around,” Nashipei told Climate Home News.

Lorna Nashipei started with a small kitchen garden, now she farms two acres of land in her village in southern Kenya

Nashipei convinced her husband to allow her to start a kitchen garden. Over time, the number of times she asked for vegetable money reduced, but the frequency Nashipei served the family vegetables increased. 

When her husband questioned how Nashipei was managing to serve vegetables regularly, without asking for money, she saw an opportunity to request a more significant portion of land. 

Today, Nashipei farms nearly two acres of maize, beans, sweet potatoes, peas, assorted traditional vegetables, and grass for her cows. Her husband is helping her fence the land to protect the crops from livestock destruction. 

She earns around 30,000 Kenyan Shillings ($269) selling farm produce during a good harvest. She has invested some of this money in a community savings programme, known as table banking, where members pool their savings and lend to each other. 

Nashipei makes an individual contribution of 3,000 Kenyan Shillings ($27) each month and has used the table banking system to buy goats, food and help pay for school fees. 

Nashipei is not the only woman succeeding in making land decisions in Kenya. Since the 2016 community land bill passed, Alubbe says two pastoralist communities in Laikipia county have successfully registered their land.

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In these communities, eight women have been included in land governance structures. They are registered as part of the groups harvesting sand, sold in nearby towns for construction, and as part of the committees that allocate grazing areas, something that has not happened before. 

“It is a good precedent,” says Alubbe. “The hope is that as more communities register themselves and their lands, women’s land rights will expand from access and use to control and ownership and that communities will learn from these two pastoralists groups where women make decisions on how land is used.” 

Nashipei’s initially sceptical husband has allowed her to access and manage two acres of land. Although the land title is still in her husband’s name, Nashipei is in the process of having her name included on the family title deed.

“Since he has seen the farm generate income and reduce financial burden on him, he has allowed me to grow crops without his permission. We have saved around 8,000-10,000 Kenyan shillings ($70-100) each month,” she says.

Rono hopes to see more women fight for their rights to owning and controlling land and make better decisions on how to adapt to the changing weather. But the gulf between statutory and customary laws makes this complicated, says Batamuliza.

“Statutory law recognises that women can control and own land, but on the ground, the customary laws controlling land allocations are already institutionalised culturally and socially. The customary law is more prevalent than the statutory law advocating for equality of land inheritance,” Batamuliza says.

“Unless there is advocacy in behaviour and an attitude change among the traditional decision makers and influencers in African communities, the two worlds cannot exist coherently. We will not see a lot of change just from adopting all these declarations, laws and policies.”

This article is part of a climate justice reporting programme supported by the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.

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