Day 13: Agriculture

Today you will learn from expert guest Navin Ramankutty about the agriculture sector, why it contributes to climate change, and how eliminate or mitigate the problems of the agriculture sector to solve climate change.

Summary

Guest: Navin Ramankutty

Navin Ramankutty is Professor and Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1 in Data Science for Sustainable Global Food Systems at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and IRES. His research program aims to understand how humans use and modify the Earth’s land surface for agriculture and its implications for the global environment. Using global Earth observations and numerical ecosystem models, his research aims to find solutions to the problem of feeding humanity with minimal global environmental footprint. He contributed to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report and to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was an editor of the journal Global Food Security and Global Ecology and Biogeography, and is an Associate Editor of Environmental Research Letters. He is a Leopold Leadership Fellow.

Follow Navin:

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Explain succinctly what the agriculture is from first principles.

Agriculture is the growing and management of crops and animals by humans to produce food and other commodities. So, for example, we grow maize, wheat, rice, oil, palm and other crops,  and we also manage cows, pigs, sheep on our land.

Why is agriculture a problem for climate change?

Scientists have estimated that a quarter of our climate change problem today is because of agriculture and land use change.

There are three main ways in which agriculture and land use affect climate.

• Deforestation: when we clear forests and replace them with agriculture, the deforestation releases carbon dioxide or CO2 into the atmosphere, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes climate change.
• Paddy cultivation: rice paddy cultivation and animal management causes methane emissions, which is another greenhouse gas that causes climate change.
• Fertilizers: our use of fertilizers on farmland causes nitrous oxide emissions, which is yet another greenhouse gas.

Why is agriculture important to address? What's at stake if we don't address it?

our Earth is already warmed by a little more than one degree Celsius since the pre industrial era.  If we want to prevent this warming from reaching  dangerous levels, which currently is estimated to mean limiting total warming to one and a half to two degrees Celsius above pre industrial, then we need to do everything we can to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions.

If you reduce all other emissions to zero except those from agriculture, it will be impossible to keep warming below the 1. 5 degrees Celsius target and very difficult to keep it even below the 2 degrees Celsius target. In other words, just the food system emissions alone will cause us to exceed our warming targets.

How might we mitigate or eliminate some of the problems of agriculture to climate change?

Solutions fall in three broad categories:

• Slow down or halt deforestation for agriculture: This is one of the primary causes of carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change.  
• Support farmers: we need to support our farmers in using environmental best practices, such as limiting tillage, using crop rotations, and using cover crops. This may be through either improving the environmental performance of current conventional agriculture or through switching to alternative agriculture practices, such as organic agriculture or agroecology.
• Food consumption:  we need to think about the demand side of the system itself to reduce our demand for food and other commodities. It is estimated that a third of our food produced globally is lost or wasted.  That's a huge leverage point. We can also reduce food demand by shifting our diet to eating more plants. This is because it's far more efficient to get our calories and nutrients from eating plants than eating animal based products.

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Additional Resources

• Climate Solutions 101 by Project Drawdown
• Environment Reports from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota
• Agriculture & Climate Change: Reducing Emissions in our Food Systems

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Top Skills To Learn

Our guest recommends learning the following skills:

• Critical thinking: constantly questioning your own assumptions and being open to other arguments counter to your own prior beliefs. That is simply listening to arguments and being willing to change your mind.  
• Curiosity: constantly questioning things is a good way to start and become a child again and ask why constantly.
• Community building: build connections and build bridges between people and communities, if we are to solve our global challenges, we need, we do need really smart people. But increasingly, we need smart people who can also build the coalitions.

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Activity

Activity: Soil Carbon Experiment

Description: Collect soil samples from different areas, such as a garden, park, and paved area. Compare the soil health, texture, and organic matter content in each sample. Reflect on how soil health influences carbon sequestration and the role of land use in preserving healthy soils.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.