Over the next 13 years, Mexico became agriculturally self-sufficient, and in 1964 began exporting wheat for the world market.  In India, the Rockefeller Foundation spread Borlaug’s new varieties and technologies, pulling India from the brink of mass famine.  In the Philippines, new varieties of rice increased production from 3.7 to 7.7 million tons per year by 1976.

There is, however, another aspect of the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution enabled a worldwide standard of agricultural production that was modeled after what was already happening in industrialized nations. This model requires heavy irrigation, intensive inputs of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and large-scale monocultures (single-crop farms), with accompanying hypoxic zones in the seas, increased deforestation, and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The ability to produce so much more food, and the export of cheap grains all over the world meant that the way in which we eat began to change.  As poverty levels fell, and feed prices fell due to excess grain production (helped by state subsidies), more people began to have access to meat. Since 1967 we’ve seen meat demand in developing countries grow by roughly 5% per year, from 11 kg/capita to 24 kg/capita.  That’s expected to rise by 57% by 2020.

More cattle means more pasture and feed land, and we’ve seen agricultural lands grow significantly in the last few decades.  According to the IPCC, agricultural lands have grown from 4,562Mha since the 1960s to 5,023Mha in 2005, now covering 40 - 50% of the world’s surface. Not surprisingly, the majority of that growth happened in the developing world. The IPCC is projecting an additional 500Mha of land will be converted to agriculture by 2050, mostly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, most of that converted land is carved out of our tropical rain forests.

We’ve seen up to a quarter of the world’s forest loss happen in the last 30 years alone. Of course, not all of that deforestation is related to agriculture and the growth of the cattle industry. But Dr. Norman Myers, of Oxford University, estimated at an FAO conference that 5% of deforestation is due to cattle ranching, 19% to over-heavy logging, 22% to palm oil plantations (largely for biofuels!), and a whopping 54% to slash-and-burn farming, often attributed to soybean and corn production. While traditional slash-and-burn agriculture was largely small-scale subsistence farming, we’ve seen an increased trend towards large-scale, mechanized commodity food production. Dr. Ruth Defries, of Columbia University, noted that in her 2006 paper “Cropland Expansion Changes Deforestation Dynamics in the Southern Brazilian Amazon” (links to PDF).  The growth of agriculture is a driving force in deforestation, reducing our carbon sinks all over the world. Indeed, deforestation presently accounts for 12 – 15% of global carbon emissions.

But what of greenhouse gas emissions associated with cultivation? The IPCC concluded in 2005 that agriculture accounted for 10 - 12% of global anthropogenic emissions, not related to deforestation. While that perhaps doesn’t seem like a huge percentage, the nature of agriculture emissions paints a different picture.

The problem of agricultural GHG emissions isn’t just how much is being emitted, but rather how potent the gases are. The main emissions are CO2, N20, and CH4. CO2 emissions happen because things in the soil rot and decay, and through that process CO2 is released into the air. However, plants also absorb CO2 and return it to the soil. So, the total release of CO2 from cultivation is really only 1% of the total global CO2 emissions.

N20 and CH4 (nitrous oxide and methane) are different, however — because methane is about 20 times more powerful in trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, and methane is 310 times more powerful.

The release of N2O and CH4 are largely a result of how we conduct agriculture today. N2O emissions are largely the consequence of applying too much nitrogen — a fertilizer usually chemically produced and promoted on large scales during the Green Revolution — over large areas. Not only is N2O a major greenhouse gas, but excess nitrogen often finds its way into our streams and rivers, leading to extensive areas at the mouths of rivers where there is no oxygen, and is thus fatal for animals. One of the largest is in the Gulf of Mexico.

CH4 — methane — on the other hand, is largely emitted because of our appetite for meat, and especially beef. Methane is released by cattle in the form of burps and flatulence, and the storage of their manures. Methane is also emitted as organic matter decays in oxygen-deprived places, like in an underwater environment. Because of this, the cultivation of submerged rice — a crop specifically targeted for expanded cultivation in the Green Revolution – also emits a significant amount of methane emissions.

And while agriculture produces a lot of these greenhouse gases through cultivation and ranching, we also need to consider the increased reliance on farm machinery to apply fertilizers and pesticides over such large scales, and to transport grain and food from local places to very distant ones. Thus, the emissions of agricultural vehicles and building design also contribute to global GHG emissions.

The issues we’re facing for the future are serious: with our world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, how can we feed those to come? How can we continue to increase our agricultural yields, while acknowledging and dealing with how many greenhouse gases are released into our atmosphere? How can we scale back deforestation while rising incomes around the world imply an increasing demand for meat and cheap feed for that cattle? How do we deal with the contributions of agricultural emissions to climate change when we know also that climate change is going to alter our agricultural landscape? In a word, how do we enable sustainable development?

Whatever our solutions might be, it is clear that we’ll need creative thinking to look forward and move ahead. What do you think could be done? Comments are open below!

Dr. Charles Vest

The Columbia Climate Center, in collaboration with the Columbia Water Center and the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, invites you to attend “The National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges: An Overview and Focus on Water,” on Tuesday, November 24 at 3 pm. The event will feature Charles Vest, President, National Academy of Engineering and President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Farouk El-Baz, Director, Center for Remote Sensing and Research Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University. Earth Institute Director Jeffrey D. Sachs, will introduce the event, and Columbia Climate Center Director Peter Schlosser will conclude.

When: Tuesday, November 24, 3 to 4:30 PM (reception to follow)

Where: 1501 International Affairs Building, 420 W 118th St at Amsterdam Ave (map)

Registration: http://climate.columbia.edu/?id=events

Event details: Sustainable development on a planet with finite resources and a growing population is not only a desirable, but a priority. In February 2008, a National Academy of Engineering committee unveiled their perception of the grand challenges of engineering that face humanity in the 21st century. Meeting the demands of growing energy needs while curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, overcoming water scarcity, fighting disease, ensuring security, building and maintaining sustainable urban infrastructure, and furthering discovery and learning are just a few of the areas that require concerted research from engineers, natural scientists, doctors, and social scientists alike.

The grand challenges are:

• Make solar energy economical
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Advance personalized learning
• Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Dr. Charles Vest, President of the National Academy of Engineering and President Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will discuss the process that led to the list and present an overview of fourteen challenges and the role that we can play in meeting them. He will be joined by Professor Farouk El-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, who will focus primarily on the challenge inherent to meeting the need for water in the face of a growing population, increased urbanization, and a changing climate.

For more information about the NAE’s Grand Challenges of Engineering, to express your opinion about the fourteen challenges, or to choose the highest priority challenge, go to http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/. Please join us on Tuesday November 24 to learn about the challenges firsthand!

EXCUSE 1. “A global average surface temperature increase does not seem too troublesome to me. Besides, who wouldn’t want a few more degrees of warmth on a chilly winter morning?”
Solution: See CRED’s guide, Section 3: Translate this scientific data into a relevant experience that appeals to your audience. For example, in New York City, climate change will lead to increased precipitation, which without proper infrastructure improvements, could equate to more transit delays and backups of the city’s combined sewage overflows. When talking about climate change, make it personal. All New Yorkers can commiserate over subway problems. Imagine these problems increasing in frequency.

EXCUSE 2. “I am too concerned with keeping my job and health insurance to consider the impacts climate change.”
Solution: Understand that humans have a “finite pool of worry”, as explained in Section 4, Beware the Overuse of Emotional Appeals. We have a limited capacity for how many issues we can worry about at once, therefore climate communicators must decide what is most important to an audience. One example might be to explain the spread of insect-borne diseases into new regions. Climate change is making scenarios like this a reality in the southwest United States, as was recently reported by the NRDC.

EXCUSE 3: “Climate change is a worldwide concern, so why should I be bothered?”
Solution: Section 6, Tap Into Social Identities and Affiliations, explains the idea that everyone’s problem is no one’s problem. This is called the “tragedy of the commons,”conflicts that result from unrestricted demand for resources. In seeking change on the environmental front, an effective technique is encouraging group participation. Cooperation is much more likely when a neighborhood understands the value in protecting their local parks or waterways.

EXCUSE 4: “I care about the environment. I recycle!”
Solution: CRED explains this reasoning in Section 4, Beware the Overuse of Emotional Appeals, as “the single action bias,” a feeling that one action is doing enough to protect the environment. An effective strategy to combat this is to first make your audience aware of the bias and then list a few longer term actions, such as conserving less energy or switching to renewable options. Lifestyle changes do not have to happen overnight, but emphasize that recycling is only one step in the move towards more environmentally responsible behavior .

Interested in learning more about how to fight climate change ambivalence? Find many more examples in CRED’S guide.

“What motivates me is developing climate information, from understanding to prediction, that can ultimately impact climate-related decisions,” Goddard says. “This alone isn’t enough to enable most decision making. There are many important actors in between-from the communication experts to the sector experts-but it is a necessary starting point,” she says.

Read more on the IRI home page.

A group of farmers in rural Ethiopia meet to discuss drought index insurance for their village.

Experts from Swiss Re, Oxfam America, and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society recently participated in a panel discussion at Columbia recently on weather index insurance for climate change adaptation. The event, organized as part of efforts to support Climate Week in New York, was sponsored by the New York Committee for Oxfam America, and hosted by the M.A. program in Climate and Society at Columbia University.

David Bresch, vice president of sustainability and emerging risk at Swiss Re, led the talks and was followed by Marjorie Victor of Oxfam America, Daniel Osgood, an economist at the IRI, and Tufa Dinku, a climate scientist at the IRI.

The discussion focused on the group’s efforts to implement an innovative microinsurance program in rural Ethiopia, designed to help rain-fed farmers become more resilient to droughts.

“We can’t separate sound development from a sound climate change adaptation strategy any longer,” said Bresch. “But we need economically viable solutions.”

During his comments, Bresch discussed a recently released Swiss Re report titled “Shaping Climate-Resilient Development” in which the authors show that climate change is likely to cost developing countries up to 19% of their GDP by 2030. The report itself outlines a bottom-up microeconomic approach to identify least-cost, best-practice actions for climate adaptation that fit a diversity of geographic and economic scenarios worldwide. By implementing these actions, the authors claim that 40-68% of that loss can be offset.

One of those actions that may reduce climate risk is offering poor farmers the chance to purchase microinsurance policies tied to the amount of rainfall their crops receive. Doing so would provide low-cost assurance to farmers during drought years by eliminating much of the cost associated with traditional insurance, like sending insurance representatives to verify losses and check for fraud. It would also allow farmers to take more productive “good risks”, like using fertilizer, during years where rainfall is likely to be favorable.

The certainty that insurance affords farmers regarding their rainfall allows them to make better use of their productive assets. “When you’re buying insurance, you’re buying certainty,” said Oxfam America’s Victor. “Making better use of assets makes farmers more productive and reduces poverty”.

In Ethiopia, Oxfam America is working with Swiss Re and a vast network of local stakeholders to establish a holistic climate risk management strategy for the village of Adi Ha. The strategy for Adi Ha includes risk reduction through community-led environmental efforts, risk transfer through purchasing weather index insurance, and prudent risk taking by making fertilizer and improved seeds more available through loans from local lending institutions.

So far, the Adi Ha project has enrolled 20% of the local population in the project, which requires participants to purchase the insurance contracts with their own money at a fair market rate. One goal of the project is to prove the financial viability of the microinsurance tool as a way of cost-effectively addressing climate risk.

“The experience in Adi Ha has so far challenged the conventional wisdom of what is possible,” said Osgood. Researchers at the IRI and Columbia University have shown takeup rates in Adi Ha to be significantly higher than in similar previously implemented projects, despite the focus in Adi Ha on insuring the “poorest of the poor”. The Adi Ha project has been able to make this advance by helping farmers tap into an underutilized resource: their own labor.

By allowing farmers to receive a voucher for the rainfall insurance contract by performing environmental tasks that benefit the community, like building check-dams and learning to compost, the Oxfam project has tied together a complete climate risk management strategy.

“Weather insurance on its own is like a wheel without a car,” said Osgood. “You to have all parts working together to have a complete product.” It shouldn’t be treated as a standalone product, he said.

Farmer driven processes, like those being pioneered in Adi Ha, direct the actions of local and international partners.  These processes, like the election of an insurance “design team” of farmers within the local community, help frame the insurance design around the challenge of developing appropriate products that will meet the test of sustainability.

“The task is to build a package of risk management tools, keeping careful track of remaining risks.  These tools include water management, environmental risk reduction activities (like terracing and composting), diversified crop portfolios, and community based risk sharing, with insurance playing a role of addressing the residual risks that remain.

Based on this integrated approach, scientists at the IRI are working to use the latest climate science to improve on earlier weather insurance products while farmers in Adi Ha make plans to train farmers in neighboring villages, working with local partners (including DECSI (a local MFI), REST (a local NGO), and Nyala (a local insurance company)) in focus group meetings to discuss which years in the past had drought problems, among other issues. Meanwhile, Dinku, along with colleagues at the University of Reading, hopes to improve Ethiopia’s available rainfall datasets by recalibrating old satellite data, in order to get a more accurate idea of how frequent droughts were in the past. With both of these pieces of information, the insurance should help farmers better plan for the future.

However, actions undertaken to reduce climate risk–such as the ones Swiss Re and Oxfam America are demonstrating in Ethiopia–shouldn’t be seen as being completely altruistic, Bresch said. He argued that appropriately valuing climate risk will “incentivise people around the world to do their own share of risk mitigation,” thereby limiting the occurrence of climate-related disasters in the future, just like the project in Ethiopia hopes to do.

Obama Putting $3.4 Bn Toward a ‘Smart’ Power Grid, Associated Press

President Obama pledges $3.4 bn in government support for 100 different research projects in “smart” grid engineering, ranging in size from $400,00 to $200 million. Speaking Tuesday at the DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in west Florida, Obama likened the search for power grid solutions to the rapid expansion of the national highway system 50 years ago. The 100 projects chosen include installing thousands of digital sensors through out the power system, deploying sophisticated metering systems in homes, and the automation of hundreds of grid substations.

Australia Coastal Living at Risk, BBC

An Australian parliamentary committee concludes that government intervention might be necessary in the future to force coastal residents to move further inland. As sea levels rise and climate chance introduces greater frequency of extreme weather events, Australians in coastal environments are put at further risk. Australia’s major urban centers are all located on the coast plus an additional six million residents elsewhere on the coastline – totaling approximately 80% of Australia’s population. The report recommends gradually freezing coastal development and eventually retreating from high-risk areas as climate change unfolds.

Energy-Proportional Computing and Climate Change, Reuters

The rapid expansion of Internet and computing services has brought with it a demand for more servers – and more power. Data servers, which run 24 hours a day, account for approximately 2% of our national power needs. This number is expected to grow quickly as more people come online at faster rates. However, a new engineering technique could potentially save power: energy-proportional computing. Most servers still consume 50% of their peak power when idle. Energy-proportional energy makes servers more flexible and responsive, so that power consumption is directly proportional to power needs . Energy-proportional computing could save up to 20% of power use if fully implemented on today’s servers.

Ecuador to Europe: Pay Us Not to Drill in Amazon, seattlepi.com

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador has an unusual idea: in exchange for not drilling for crude oil in an Amazon preserve, rich countries would pay Ecuador $3 bn, an estimation of the gains to be made from drilling over a period of ten years. President Correa first proposed this idea two years ago and it has been under serious consideration since then. Many environmentalists believe that a deal like this, not all that different from payments to avoid deforestation, would set a positive standards for rich countries helping developing countries “go green.”

Last week the Pew Center released a new poll regarding the “Changing Opinions About Global Warming.” The polls are certainly telling, if not alarming: in April 2008 71% of Americans believed there was solid evidence that the earth was warming. That’s down to 57% this month.

Perhaps more importantly, the percentage of those people who believe global warming is due to human activities is down from 45% in 2008 to 36% now. The only demographic in which belief in global warming rose were young democrats, ages 18-29, by 5%.

The Pew Report follows on a wave of debate sparked by Paul Hudson’s blog-post-turned-article on the BBC’s News website, “What Happened to Global Warming?“  Global warming skeptics have found encouragement from Hudson’s article and the Pew Report, and have lashed out against Brian Williams’ suggestion on NBC Nightly News that people were less concerned with environment in a down economy, sparking a wave of protest around the blogosphere. The New York Time’s Weekend Opinionator tracked those opinions last weekend.  But researchers at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions have noted that humans have a “finite pool of worry:” concern about the environment is likely to wane when one loses their job or is facing other stresses.

Looking back at the history of the phrase “Global Warming,” we note that it was actually coined by a Lamont-based scientist, Wally Broecker, in 1975. (Links to PDF). His point was not to start a movement on curtailing greenhouse gases, but rather to superimpose global trends in anthropogenic-related temperature increases over natural climate cycles. These include orbital shifts, changes in the solar cycle, and decadal and seasonal to interannual variability such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) or the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Hudson notes that the PDO can lead to cooling periods of about 30 years that have the net effect of “canceling” rising temperature trends and may be responsible for the current stable global temperatures.

The climate that we observe is a result of the interaction of all these forcing mechanisms. While the balance of current forcing is “masking” the effect of greenhouse gases, the forcing can and likely will shift to reinforce anthropogenic warming. As Wally Broecker has indicated, climate is complex “beast” and human emissions of greenhouse gases are like poking the climate with a stick.

Something especially important to remember that often gets lost in the debate: local weather is not the same as climate. Global warming means an overall increase in the global average temperatures (right now we’re on track for a 1.5 degrees C increase), but the effects of global warming don’t mean that local weather conditions will necessarily be warmer everywhere.  What it does mean is that global weather patterns will shift, redistributing clouds, precipitation, ocean currents such that some places will experience warming, and some places cooling. And natural variability, be it from solar forcing, the PDO or ENSO, will continue to influence climate and weather patterns.

So what does this have to do with public perceptions of climate change? If it’s cold outside and raining, one is unlikely to feel that global warming is as real as if one is in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave. Although local weather is not climate, it is how we experience climate. It is hard to forget that what we see and feel today is just one point on the globe and one point in time. In a moment of economic uncertainty, it is hard to worry about something that is not directly observable to the guy on the street, especially something that may not have visible impacts for several decades.

But perceptions are not a measure of whether a scientific idea is correct or not — perceptions reflect the conditions of the moment and the understanding of the moment. We need to remember that moments are just that, and climate change will still continue on long, long past this one.

WWF: We Have Until 2014 to Stop Global Warming, Popular Science

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) publishes a new report concluding that by 2014 the world must fully embrace low-carbon technologies. By “embrace” they mean a minimum growth of 22% in green industries, which they estimate could translate into a 63% reduction in emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels. If this rapid investment is not secured, the carbon concentration in our atmosphere would cross 475 parts per million – a threshold at which rapid climate change becomes much more likely. Currently the level of CO2 and CO2 equivalents in the atmosphere is 463 parts per million.

CEOs No Longer Refute Climate Change, Reuters

Members of the Business Council, a collection of executives from the top 120 US companies, have agreed that climate change is occurring and that the threat is real. Company executives agreed that the science was real and that adaptation and mitigation requires a global, united effort. Insiders say that this is a significant development for the council, where arguments over climate change have raged for decades.

Beijing’s Air is Cleaner, But Far From Clean, The New York Times

Beijing’s air has steadily gotten cleaner, say city officials. Relying on a detailed pollution index, government researchers have concluded that the 12-month period through September, 2009 has been the cleanest year since 1998. Despite improvements in quality, Beijing’s air still fails World Health Organization’s standards - in 2008 pollution levels were six times the WHO threshold for cleanliness – and was criticized by the international community during the Olympics as being unsafe. However, the ongoing improvement in air quality is an encouraging sign that municipal mitigation techniques, such as hybrid buses and new-car emissions standards, make a difference.

Costly New Nuclear System May Cut Waste, Arms Risk, Reuters

A new wave of nuclear reactors, dubbed Generation IV Reactors, are expected to be ready for deployment in 10-15 years, say industry giants GE Hitachi, Areva, and Toshiba-Westinghouse. Many critics of nuclear power point to the largely unresolved issue of nuclear waste: what do we do with it? The new technologies provide ways to potentially mitigate this concern. Generation IV Reactors utilize a technology known as closed fuel cycles, whereby spent nuclear fuel is repeatedly re-processed, greatly diminishing the final volume of waste. Although at this stage Generation IV technologies are prohibitively expensive, experts maintain that eventually these re-processing processes will be deployed on an industrial scale.

India-China Climate Deal, BBC

Two of the largest greenhouse gas emitters, China and India, have agreed to work together to reduce emissions and promote sustainable development. This cooperative effort comes at a crucial time as the United Nations Copenhagen Conference is barely a month away. However, both countries continue tomaintain that limiting emissions will stunt economic growth and that this responsibility should mainly fall on developed countries who bear the historical responsibility for stocks of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

As readers of this blog well know, El Niño describes sustained sea-surface temperature (SST) anomalies greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean. It is the warm phase of a coupled ocean-atmosphere system that has important – and relatively predictable – consequences for weather around the globe.

Given that El Niño conditions improve our ability to predict climate conditions in many parts of the world, researchers at the IRI have worked long and hard to show that climate information can be used by decision makers to mitigate the negative impacts of El Niño and transform El Niño years into the least costly in terms of life and property. These new reports represent their latest attempt to do just that.

The first report, entitled Current Rainfall Conditions and El Niño Teleconnections, gives an indication of where, and to what extent, expected teleconnections are playing out around the globe. This report is complemented by an Overview of Current Socioeconomics and of Upcoming Seasonal Precipitation Odds, which highlights areas most likely to suffer socioeconomic losses associated with adverse weather-related impacts. Together, they give policymakers a sense of where they might expect trouble.

If you’re thinking about checking out the documents, you might also want to visit the IRI’s ENSO web page, which includes a variety of information on both El Niño and its counterpart, La Niña. Information on the evolution of current conditions can also be found as part of the IRI’s regular climate forecast.

On October 1, I attended a symposium entitled “Going Beyond Rhetoric: Metrics for Assessing Global Agriculture,” hosted by the Earth Institute and convened at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.  Fifteen stories in the air, we were surrounded by miles of urban landscape — Queens to the east, Manhattan to the west, and no farms in sight.  In a room full of policy-makers, scientists, scholars, lobbyists, and economists, the vast landscape helped to emphasize the scope and scale of the decisions being made that day — how far-reaching the ideas being discussed went, beyond the horizon.

The goal of the conference was to establish concrete metrics — or targets — for determining desirable agricultural impacts.  The conference was divided into four sessions that each begged a different question: where will our nutrient sources come from to feed a rapidly growing population?  How can we develop an ecologically robust agricultural landscape?  What are the potentials and risks of GE crops?  And what are the ways forward?

Perhaps we should first ask ourselves: why should we even care?  Won’t business as usual be enough to feed our populations — that is, assuming present diets don’t change? The truth, however, is that by 2050 the Earth’s population is expected to reach 9 billion people and will require at 120% increase in current levels of production.  With the majority of our world population now living in urban areas, and climate change already altering our agricultural landscape and productive outputs, how are we going to feed that many people while still meeting targets for real sustainability?

Some important facts came to light during the conference:
1. Already today, 1 billion people are starving or chronically malnourished.  Another 1 billion are chronically overweight!
2. To continue business as usual, by 2050 we would have to clear an additional 900 million hectares of land, which would put increasing pressure on our tropical rainforests, which already work as vast carbon sponges.
3. At the very most, we will only really be able to add an additional 100 million hectares.  There are 4.3 million hectares under cultivation presently.
4. Already, agriculture accounts for 1/3 of total greenhouse gas emissions, largely from deforestation, livestock, carbon-intensive transportation, and rice paddies.  That fact alone already necessitates agricultural reform!
5. Agriculture accounts for 85% of human water consumption, altering hydrologies and depleting aquifers around the world.

While by no means an entirely comprehensive picture of the state of conventional agriculture, every scholar, scientist, and policy-makers present that day used these facts to reemphasize the necessity of establishing metrics to figure out how to measure the success or failures of reforms for the future.

So what did they determine?  According to the Tropical Agriculture Project’s summary of the symposium, participants established six necessary categories into which all our metrics should fall: environmental sustainability, social well-being, national prosperity, food security, human health, and rural livelihoods.  Perhaps even more importantly, participants discussed the feasibility of implementing universal metrics.  While surely the idea and implementation of a set of universal metrics is not without problems, it gives us an idea of what we can do to move forward.  As I explore more thoroughly the challenges climate change poses to agriculture over the next few months, it will be good to keep those categories, and the above facts, in mind.

The symposium’s web page can be found here, and the symposium wrap up here (pdf).