Top 10 Mitigation Option through the Supply Chain: The reports summarises findings from both local and international studies and highlights the key opportunities that exist for the average South African producer.
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Recent Climate Change Policy developments: The report explains the recent progress in the local climate change policy arena, with specific reference to the much debated carbon tax, in lay-mans language.
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Carbon Stocks at a Farm level: The report summarised the basic concepts of carbon pools and flows and explain the processes at a farm and landscape scale. It illustrates that while the idea has intuitive appeal: "Surely the trees on my farm are growing and storing carbon which should be offset against the emissions generated through the use of electricity or combustion of diesel?" – the answer is not that straightforward.
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The international climate change Conference of the Parties (COP) will be taking place in Durban this year, and the South African government will be in the limelight to showcase our best efforts at addressing climate-change related issues. The annual conference aims to assess international progress in dealing with climate change, specifically monitoring against the current Kyoto Protocol instrument for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The negotiations takes place on the backdrop of disappointing meeting (CoP16) that took place in Cancun Mexico last year. It widely expected that the conference in South Africa will successfully lead to the finalization of a legally binding instrument (post Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012) and improve the details of the operation and implementation of the Green Climate Fund.

On July 7, the last of three independent British commissions exonerated prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia of any wrongdoing in the so-called "Climategate," in which mysterious (and still anonymous) hackers trashed their reputations and confused public understanding of important climate science.

AGRI SA'S INPUT IN TO COP 17 NEGOTIATIONS

Johannes Möller, Agri SA's President presented the organisation's views on climate change at the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries' National Conference in preparation of the UNFCCC COP 17 events.

Möller submitted that given the peculiar position of the agricultural sector in relation to climate change, the following should be addressed as part of a future process:

• Official recognition of agriculture as a sector that is adversely affected by the effects of climate change and, at the same time, as a sector with a huge potential to provide solutions to climate change mitigation and adaptation.


• A commitment for substantial increase in investments in and support for agriculture. The sector must be prioritized in international and national strategies as well as in budgets in order to increase agriculture's resilience to climate change while boosting economic growth.


• Support for the full integration of agriculture in a future binding agreement in Durban (UNFCC, COP 17), including consideration of a possible Agricultural Sector Agreement.


• Recognition of the specific characteristics and needs of agriculture in a future agreement in order to take full advantage of the mitigation and adaptation potential of the agricultural sector as the current Kyoto does not deal with this to the required extent.


• Establishment of appropriate financial mechanisms to reward farmers for the carbon sequestration, ecosystem services and permanent reductions that mitigate climate change, providing them with the right financial incentives to adopt the most sustainable practices and to supply low-carbon services (energy and materials) alongside food, and fodder products.


• Recognition of Farmers' Organizations as partners, as the link between farming communities and the international carbon market, and as a link to the international institutions.


• An evaluation of the internalisation of costs through e.g. a carbon tax should take the inelastic demand for energy and the concomitant inability to adapt to an alternative system without it leading to structural production adjustments in agriculture into consideration.


• The ability of the agricultural sector to contribute to renewable energy and biofuels in particular should as also required by the New Growth Path and the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP2) be subjected to renewed scrutiny.

(Text sourced from AgriSA August E-Newsletter. Original author: Nic Opermann)

New Mexico wine grapes running late reports Wine & Vines

While Texas, its big neighbour to east, shrivelled in record heat and drought, New Mexico's still diminutive wine industry suffered a setback of the opposite extreme, reports Wines & Vines. A dire freeze the third week of February dropped temperatures to minus-3° to 4°F in the southern part of the state, minus-20°F in the north. "It cost us a lot of grapes and vines," mostly in the New Mexico Rio Grande Valley in the south, said Bernd Maier, viticulture extension specialist at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Effects of the freeze were later exacerbated by unseasonable April frosts, just when vines were budding in the northern part of the state. The end result: "We expect a harvest about 40% of normal this year. That's statewide. Some folks have nothing, some have more," Maier told Wines & Vines. What is a normal crush for New Mexico? That's problematic. According to Maier, the state does not require grape crop reports, so there are no accurate statistics for tonnage. A recent study revealed the wine and grape industry funnels some $45 million into the state's economy. Maier estimated that some 1,200 acres are planted to wine grapes, most of them in production. Maier admitted that his loss estimates are experience-based, from eyeballing the vineyards. That figure will probably remain reduced for the next few years, though, as farmers struggle to re-establish vineyards lost to the freeze. "Some have started to replant," Maier reported. "In other cases, they were not able to get the desired plants and varieties in time, and will have to wait until next spring. There's also a lot of retraining going on. Those vines should have a crop next year." Because of the diversity between New Mexico's warmer southern region and the high-altitude north, where vineyards are planted at elevations from 5,500 to nearly 7,000 feet above sea level, the state is not known for a particular, signature grape. In the south, Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Malbec and various Mediterranean varieties do well, and Cabernet Sauvignon is in high demand, Maier said. "In the northern part, they are trying Riesling and hybrid varieties." Although the southern harvest usually begins in late July, Maier said, "I don't know of anyone who started then; some began harvesting Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for sparkling wine and some Sauvignon Blanc in early August." Grape grower perspective Paulo D'Andrea manages 300 acres for the Swiss owners of New Mexico Vineyards (NMV), the state's largest grape grower. He has another 30 acres at his 5,000-case Luna Rossa Winery in Deming. The freeze cost some 5%-10% of his vines, but damage was not widespread, he reported. Because NMV maintains a 150,000-plant grapevine nursery and supplies New Mexico-certified vines to other vineyards, D'Andrea has been able to replant without delay. He began harvesting for sparkling wine the first week of August and is proceeding now with Pinot Grigio, Riesling and Gewürztraminer. "We have about 48 different varieties," he noted. Harvest will probably continue this year until about the third week of September. "This year, the majority is being hand-harvested," he said; last year, about 30% of the state's crop was machine-harvested.

Read more at:

http://www.winesandvines.com/template.cfm?section=news&content=91454&htitle=New%20Mexico%20Winegrapes%20Running%20Late

New Mexico wine grapes running late reports Wine & Vines

The region's trade body, the Comité Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne (CIVC) has permitted the earliest ripening areas to pick from 19 August including the villages of Cumieres, Sacy and Damery in the Marne Valley, and Buxeuil, Neuville-sur-Seine, and Polisot in the Aube.
Thibaut le Mailloux, communications director at the CIVC, told decanter.com "2011 is going to be an extremely early harvest in the region of Champagne, missing the absolute record of 2003 by one day only."

The 2011 harvest is indeed starting on August 19 in several crus of the French departments of L'Aube and La Marne, for Pinot Noir and Meunier - and as soon as on the 20 for Chardonnay. 90% of the vineyards will basically have started to harvest by August 25.

The only other harvest that commenced this early occurred 189 years ago, in 1822.

The early ripening Pinot Meunier is the first variety to be picked, followed by Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

CEO of Champagne Louis Roederer added, 'It willl one of the earliest harvests in history due to a summer-like spring. It should start around 22 August.

Further south, the Rhone Valley is similarly forecasting a premature harvest. Laure Vaisserman, head of media for Inter-Rhone, reported, 'The latest observations in the vineyard indicate an advance of approximately 18 to 25 days on 2010.'

Napa Winery Pioneers Solar Floatovoltaics

(source: Forbes)

A winery in California's vaunted Napa Valley has taken the plunge into solar energy – literally. The Far Niente wineryhas pioneered the world's firstFloatovoltaic system, a floating, grid-connected solar installation.
The system was designed by SPG Solar to avoid displacing valuable land for growing grapes. The Floatovoltaic system went live in 2009 and is currently producing more electric power annually than the entire winery consumes.

The solar arrays are floating on the winery's irrigation pond. The benefits of floatovoltaics include keeping the panels cooler than they would be on land, reducing the amount of water lost to evaporation and slowing the growth of algae without the use of chemicals. It also avoids the land use problems created by other solar power systems.

The idea has taken off in other parts of the world. In Israel, Solaris Synergyhas developed a concentrated photovoltaic technology for a floating farm, which includes an innovative evaporation cooling technology called Aquasun that keeps the silicon elements at a low and stable temperature. The technology is being deployed in the reservoir of a hydro power plant at Caderache in southern France.
Australian start-up Sunengy is partnering with Tata Power of India to develop a similar solar system for the reservoir of a hydro power plant in Mumbai.

Sunengy has developed a liquid solar concentrated solar array that will float on the reservoir, tracking the sun to maximize energy input while using the water to keep its silicon cool.

A new report by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) finds that close to 80% of the world's energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies. It argues that the rising penetration of renewable energies could lead to cumulative greenhouse gas savings equivalent to 220 to 560 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtC02eq) between 2010 and 2050.

The upper end of the scenarios assessed, representing a cut of around a third in greenhouse gas emissions from business-as-usual projections, could assist in keeping concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million.

The findings of this 1000 page report are contained in a summary for policymakers of the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).

The six renewable energy technologies reviewed are:

• Bioenergy, including energy crops; forest, agricultural and livestock residues and so called second generation biofuels
• Direct solar energy including photovoltaics and concentrating solar power
• Geothermal energy, based on heat extraction from the Earth's interior
• Hydropower, including run-of-river, in-stream or dam projects with reservoirs
• Ocean energy, ranging from barrages to ocean currents and ones which harness temperature differences in the marine realm
• Wind energy, including on- and offshore systems

Over 160 existing scientific scenarios on the possible penetration of renewables by 2050, alongside environmental and social implications, were reviewed, with four, chosen to represent the full range, analyzed in-depth.

Key findings are as follows:

• Of the around 300 Gigawatts (GW) of new electricity generating capacity added globally between 2008 and 2009, 140 GW came from renewable energy.
• Despite global financial challenges, renewable energy capacity grew in 2009—wind by over 30 percent; hydropower by three percent; grid-connected photovoltaics by over 50 percent; geothermal by 4 percent; solar water/heating by over 20 percent and ethanol and biodiesel production rose by 10 percent and 9 percent respectively.
• Developing countries host more than 50 percent of current global renewable energy capacity.
• Most of the reviewed scenarios estimate that renewables will contribute more to a low carbon energy supply by 2050 than nuclear power or fossil fuels using carbon capture and storage (CCS).
• The technical potential of renewable energy technologies exceeds the current global energy demand by a considerable amount—globally and in respect of most regions of the world.
• Under the scenarios analyzed in-depth, less than 2.5 percent of the globally available technical potential for renewables is used—in other words over 97 percent is untapped underlining that availability of renewable source will not be a limiting factor.
• Accelerating the deployment of renewable energies will present new technological and institutional challenges, in particular integrating them into existing energy supply systems and end use sectors.
• According to the four scenarios analyzed in detail, the decadal global investments in the renewable power sector range from 1,360 to 5,100 billion US dollars to 2020 and 1,490 to 7,180 billion US dollars for the decade 2021 to 2030. For the lower values, the average yearly investments are smaller than the renewable power sector investments reported for 2009.
• A combination of targeted public policies allied to research and development investments could reduce fuel and financing costs leading to lower additional costs for renewable energy technologies.
• Public policymakers could draw on a range of existing experience in order to design and implement the most effective enabling policies--there is no one-size-fits-all policy for encouraging renewables.

To read the press release see here: http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/press_information.shtml#tabs-0.
For the Summary for Policy Makers (26 pages) see here: http://www.ipcc.ch/#

The Soil Association, a UK-based organisation, has launched a new Low Carbon Farming Project to help farmers reduce carbon emissions and improve the resource efficiency of their farms.

The project will identify user-friendly carbon foot printing tools and provide a benchmarking facility along with information, advice, and detailed case studies.

In order to provide a benchmarking facility the Soil Association needs to collect carbon foot printing data from different farms across the UK and is looking for farmers to get involved. There will be a number of low carbon workshops and on-farm training events on offer in the coming months open to all interested farmers and growers.

For more information see here: http://www.soilassociation.org/News/NewsItem/tabid/91/ArticleId/2137/Soil-Association-launches-Low-Carbon-Farming-Project.aspx.

This paper argues that a fundamental transformation of agriculture is towards the development of regenerative agricultural systems (rather than individual crops) that continuously recreate the resources they use and achieve higher productivity and profitability of the system (not necessarily of individual products) with minimal external inputs.

Reference: Hoffmann U (2011). Assuring food security in developing countries under the challenges of climate change: key trade and development issues of a fundamental transformation of agriculture, UNCTAD report No. 201

Abstract

For a large number of developing countries, agriculture remains the single most important sector. Climate change has the potential to damage irreversibly the natural resource base on which agriculture depends, with grave consequences for food security. Agriculture (and related land-use changes) is the most important emitter of global greenhouse gases (more important than all energy-intensive industries taken together and even bigger than the power sector). However, agriculture is the sector that also has the potential to transcend from being a problem to becoming an essential part of the solution to climate change provided there is a more holistic vision of food security, agricultural mitigation, climate-change adaptation and agriculture's pro-poor development contribution. What is required is a rapid and significant shift from conventional, industrial, monoculture-based and high-external-input dependent production towards mosaics of sustainable production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. The required transformation is much more profound than simply tweaking the existing industrial agricultural systems. However, the sheer scale at which modified production methods would have to be adopted, the significant governance and market-structure challenges at national and international level and the considerable difficulties involved in measuring, reporting and verifying reductions in GHG emissions pose considerable challenges.

Conclusions

• Climate change could reduce total agricultural production in many developing countries by up to 50 per cent in the next few decades, in particular in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, the population of these countries is projected to nearly double, creating huge tensions between food supply and demand.
• Although agriculture's share in global GDP is just about 4 per cent, agriculture accounts for about 13–32 per cent of global GHG emissions, the former being confined to direct, the latter including indirect GHG emissions from land-use changes, land degradation and deforestation. Under a business-as-usual scenario, agricultural GHG emissions are predicted to rise by almost 40 per cent till 2030.
• The key problems of climate change, hunger and poverty, economic, social and gender inequity, poor health and nutrition, and environmental sustainability are inter-related and need to be solved by leveraging agriculture's multi-functionality. Thus a much more holistic approach is required that not only sees the farmer as a producer of food and agricultural commodities, but also as manager of sustainable agro-ecological systems.
• The key task is to transform the uniform, high-external-input-dependent model of quick-fix industrial agriculture into a flexible approach of sustainable (regenerative) agricultural systems (rather than individual crops) that continuously recreate the resources they use and achieve higher productivity and profitability of the system (not necessarily of individual products) with minimal external inputs (including energy). While extensively drawing on local knowledge and varieties, regenerative systems will marry them with modern agricultural science and extension services and give a very pro-active role to small-scale farmers. A key challenge is to considerably lift the productivity of small-scale (family) farmers by mobilizing and empowering them to use the modern methods of regenerative agriculture.
• The sheer scale at which modified production methods would have to be adopted, the significant governance and market-structure challenges, in particular at international level, pose considerable challenges. There are very powerful vested interests by large globally active companies that dominate the agricultural input markets to keep the status quo of high external input dependent agricultural production methods. Also, large farmers will be reluctant to give up external-input- and mono-culture-based industrial agriculture, which is often very much dependent on energy, input and product price subsidies, unless there is a far-reaching subsidy reform accomplished under the current Doha Round of WTO negotiations. This would however also have to include green box support measures and energy subsidies.
• Although action at international and national levels should ideally go hand in hand, governments in developing countries can still move ahead with effective measures at national level if international-level progress is slow. Agricultural mitigation and adaptation have low or negative costs, have considerable developmental co-benefits and will significantly draw on local resources, knowledge and skills. This will however require a considerable increase of public expenditure for agriculture, with a particular emphasis on public research, extension education and services and the improvement of local infra-structure aimed at empowering in particular small-scale farmers to significantly increase total productivity of the new regenerative agricultural systems.
• There are important secondary macro-economic benefits. The most important is the 'local multiplier effect' that accompanies investments that direct a greater share of total farming input expenditures towards the purchase of locally sourced inputs (e.g. labour, organic fertilizers, bio-pesticides, renewable energy etc.) replacing conventional procurement of externally sourced inputs. Conceptually, the same investment in any other competing activity is unlikely to have as many linkages with the local economy and hence unlikely to yield a multiplier as large. De facto, this leads to a reduced dependence on global agricultural input and product markets and to a regionalization in focus, which enhances local sovereignty over key decisions rooted in the multi-functionality of agriculture.
• The current structures in global agricultural input and output markets do not ease, but rather complicate the required fundamental transformation of agricultural production methods and consumption patterns. Huge price distortions, considerable externalities, market and policy failures, as well as powerful commercial interests create a "minefield" for constructive action being (unilaterally) undertaken at national level. Without a reform of international trade and investment policies that are really supportive of ecological agriculture national-level action may remain ineffective.
• There is generally too much emphasis on and simplistic overestimation of the potential of technological development for agricultural transformation. In fact few problems in agriculture are mainly caused by a lack of technology, many are related to social, economic and cultural issues that require structural changes, not techno-fixes. It is therefore critical to first of all define what problems are best solved by changing legal frameworks, trade policies, incentive structures or human behaviour and, second, what contribution technology could make within this very context.
• There may be the need for creating an international instrument or process that provides a global framework for action and support for agricultural reform, and which would implement the recommendations of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). This could take the form of an IPCC equivalent for agriculture.
• Finally, it is important to bear in mind that "climate change" has become such a dominating issue in economic analysis and policy making that other, not much less important issues such as eco-system services, biodiversity, water management or social issues run the risk of being neglected or de-linked from the climate nexus. There is therefore a risk that governments and the international community optimize "climate mitigation and adaptation" without seeing (despite all synergies) the trade-offs and conflicts with other issues.

You can download the paper here: www.unctad.org/en/docs/osgdp20111_en.pdf

NRI has recently completed study on the implications of climate change for Fairtrade in agricultural products. The study was commissioned by the Fairtrade Foundation,. The study indicates that climate change is projected, with high degrees of certainty, to have mainly negative impacts upon agricultural production, food security and economic development, especially in developing countries. It thus poses significant challenges for the Fairtrade movement. This report sets out what we know at present about those challenges and ways to face them, and makes recommendations for actions to build the resilience of farmers against climate change that can be followed within the avenues of impact of the Fairtrade movement. The study has already been used extensively by different organisations within the Fairtrade movement to shape their responses to climate change, including the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation in Bonn, and the ISEAL Alliance, which is the global association for social and environmental standards, which has drawn heavily on this study in developing its imminent guidelines for standard systems on adaptation.

For more information and to read the report go to: http://www.nri.org/news/archive/2011/20110603-working-paper-1.html

by James Lenfestey

Published on Monday, July 19, 2010 by Minneapolis/St. Paul Star-Tribune

On July 7, the last of three independent British commissions exonerated prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia of any wrongdoing in the so-called "Climategate," in which mysterious (and still anonymous) hackers trashed their reputations and confused public understanding of important climate science.

Meanwhile, back in America, prominent climatologist Michael Mann, also reviled by critics for his "Climategate" e-mails (and for his solid climate science), was similarly exonerated by a full review panel at Penn State University, where he teaches. Most important, all review panels affirmed the underlying science, and thereby the established scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet. "The rigor and honesty of the scientists in not in doubt," the British panel concluded.

This should put to rest any remaining public "skepticism" of the scientific facts of climate change. If it doesn't, two new books will.

"Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming [1]," by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, forcefully debunks the handful of credentialed scientists, such as S. Fred Singer, who continue to beat the drum against the mainstream consensus. Singer, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publishes his virulent skepticism on the hospitable opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal and from his own foundation. The authors prove him to be practicing science outside his realm of expertise as an antiregulation ideologue.

A second book, "The Lomborg Deception [2]" by Howard Friel, is as devastating. Lomborg's two big books, "The Skeptical Environmentalist [3]" and "Cool It [4]," are the bibles of climate-change nonbelievers. Lomborg, a Danish statistician who portrays himself as a reasonable apostate from excessive environmentalism, argues in heavily footnoted texts that the threat of manmade global warming is "exaggerated," and that in any event a warmer planet may be good for us.

Reputable scientists immediately smelled something fishy in Lomborg's work. Now Freil, a journalist, has found the source of the stink. He painstakingly tracks down every one of Lomborg's thousands of endnotes and finds that his citations are a sea of deception. In many cases, the sources cited by Lomborg say exactly the opposite of what he states in his text. In others he leaves out or distorts inconvenient evidence. Sometimes there is no source at all to be found.

Pseudo-scientists like Lomborg or hypocrites like Singer are not honest scientific skeptics --skepticism is a valuable and necessary part of the scientific process-- but are ideologues who believe nothing should be done about climate change and who argue from that premise.

With these reports and books, the public debate on climate change should finally be over.

No Americans, including conservatives, have an excuse now to say that it is not happening, or to continue to argue that is caused by volcanoes (fully taken into account by scientists) or by natural climate variation (the observed evidence is way outside of historic natural variation) or that the cause is variable solar radiation (again outside the range of the sun's variable radiation). The only scientific explanation for the temperature increases observed here and now is the simultaneous dramatic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane as a result of human activities, including the waste carbon from the burning of fossil fuels.

So I challenge conservative commentators Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Katherine Kersten; the editors of the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Heartland Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, the Center of the American Experiment and other vehicles of opposition to mainstream climate science to face the facts. Stop allowing yourselves to be deceived and therefore to deceive the people who trust and depend on you.

Put the phony crisis of "Climategate" away, along with your criticism of the vast consensus of honest scientists working around the globe to bring us the truth of our changing climate. Face the facts so that your public, and the politicians who work for them, can face the facts.

The evidence is irrefutable:Global warming is upon us, and it is primarily caused by human activities. Now what are we as one people, and the family of nations, going to do about it?

© 2010 Star Tribune James P. Lenfestey, Minneapolis, is a former editorial writer for the Star Tribune

President Jacob Zuma threw his weight behind calls for green technologies and industries that will ensure that the country responds to the impact of climate change, at South Africa's Green Economy Summit held from 18-20 May 2010 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

The summit was hosted by the Departments of Economic Development, Environmental Affairs, Science and Technology as well as Trade and Industry, and was attended by over 500 participants from government, business, non-governmental organizations and the environmental sector.

Convened under the overarching theme: "Towards a resource efficient, low carbon and pro-employment growth path", the summit explored different elements contributing to economic growth, environmental protection and social well-being.

Zuma delivered a keynote address on the opening day of the summit saying that government was committed to creating an enabling environment for renewable energy and meeting the energy efficiency target of 12% by 2015. He also highlighted government's pursuit of investments in marine aquaculture development, wildlife management, waste services and ecosystems rehabilitation programmes.

He indicated that the green economy should be understood broadly: "It should seek to address the interdependence between economic growth, social protection and the preservation of natural ecosystems."

"Ecosystem failure will seriously compromise our ability to address our social and economic priorities," argued Zuma. "Natural resources are national economic assets and our economy depends heavily on energy and mineral resources, biodiversity, agriculture, forestry, fishing and tourism." In short, he said, South Africa had no option but to manage its natural resources in a sustainable way.

A draft statement of conclusion on the closing day set out a resolution that participants work together on cross-cutting issues including developing a green economy plan, a supportive regulatory framework to enable the development of sector action plans and related green markets and industries, sustainable consumption and production, clean energy and energy efficiency.

For more information, visit www.sagreeneconomysummit.co.za