Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Drought hits food supplies
BLOW TO AFRICA: “The driest February in decades” swept across a swathe of southern Africa, wiping out crops and jeopardising energy supplies, Bloomberg reported. It cited preliminary data suggesting that large parts of Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe had record-low February rainfall last month. The outlet noted that 45% of planted areas in Zambia “have been destroyed” and the president has declared a national disaster. The crop failures have “threatened to send already high food prices surging further”, Bloomberg wrote, noting that in both Zambia and Zimbabwe, prices have risen by about 75% compared to last February. In addition, “dangerously low” water levels in reservoirs in several countries could force the governments to ration power supplies.
‘DIRE NEED OF FOOD’: In the Federated States of Micronesia, in Oceania, thousands of people have been affected by drier-than-normal conditions recorded since December last year, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported. The news site interviewed Cromwell Bacareza, UNICEF’s Micronesia field office chief, who said that around 16,000 people – 40% of whom are children – “are in dire need of food”. Bacareza told the outlet: “It’s not an isolated incident, but rather a grim reminder for everyone of the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities, particularly the small island states.” RNZ cited the US National Weather Service, which has projected that the current El Niño would continue to worsen weather conditions.
SICILY’S ‘SEVERE DROUGHT’: The southern Italian island of Sicily is also under a “severe drought” due to a lack of winter rains, which has forced dozens of towns to ration water for both agriculture and residential consumption, Reuters reported. The newswire added that the risk to agriculture in Sicily was considered a “particular concern” by the EU’s crop monitoring service. Meanwhile, in the Po valley in northern Italy, rice farmers are still dealing with the impacts of a persistent drought that began in 2022 and devastated 7,500 hectares of rice fields last year alone, according to the Guardian. The outlet noted that Italy accounts for about 50% of the rice produced in the EU, and most of it comes from the Po Valley, where arborio and carnaroli rice – used in risotto – is harvested. The Guardian added that farmers have sought to diversify their crops in response to climate change.
Indigenous peoples driving conservation
INDIGENOUS VOICE: El Mostrador reported that the Chilean government has announced that it will involve Indigenous peoples in developing the country’s adaptation plan for its water sector. It added that “citizen participation” workshops will take place during March and April with the 11 Indigenous peoples legally recognised by Chile. El Mostrador quoted Cristian Núñez Riveros, the director general for water in Chile’s public-works ministry: “This will make it possible to recognise [Indigenous peoples’] interrelationship with water, considering their environment, ways of life and productive activities. It will shed light on the impacts of climate change from their voices, considering their practices and contributions to sustainable water management.”
LEADING CONSERVATION: Indigenous and coastal minority women are at the forefront of efforts to conserve Kenya’s “blue forests”, Inter Press Service reported. The women are restoring mangroves and fish ponds near Tsunza, a southern Kenyan coastal village, after fish disappeared from the area following several oil spills between 2003 and 2006, the newswire reported. Elsewhere, the Indigenous Achuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, who fought for more than 40 years to stop oil development in the area, now have solar panels in 12 of their villages, the Washington Post reported. The community had previously had little electricity coverage, but a new project has brought solar electricity to schools and homes and even allowed a switch from petrol boats to solar-powered boats.
‘THE SOLUTION’: Nearly 200 representatives of peasant and Indigenous organisations met at the end of February in south-eastern Mexico to address issues that affect them, including climate change, violence and food sovereignty, EFE Verde reported. The meeting organisers told the news agency that the meeting sought to establish actions to defend their rights in the run-up to the Mexican general elections on 2 June. In an interview with the outlet, Jesús Andrade, a member of a group of farmers’ organisations, said “the solution is peasant agroecology, which can cool the planet”. EFE Verde added that activists, NGOs and communities condemned the murder, disappearance and forced displacement of Indigenous communities by organised crime groups.
Spotlight
Dutch farm visit
In this spotlight, Carbon Brief speaks to John Arink, a Dutch organic farmer, on a media trip organised by Clean Energy Wire.
“When I look at the agricultural system at this moment, we have big problems. It is due to the system that the water is polluted…so we have to change the system.”
Amid ongoing farmer protests across the EU, one farmer in the Netherlands recently showcased the less-intensive future he wants for the agriculture sector.
John Arink, an organic farmer, spoke to Carbon Brief and other media outlets on his farm near the village of Lievelde in the east of the Netherlands, around two hours from Amsterdam.
Arink and his family run a small organic farm, shop, hotel and restaurant. He is a small producer by Dutch standards – the average dairy farm in the country has more than 100 cows. Arink has 50, alongside three pigs and 100 chickens.
Walking around the farm, a rooster crowed in an outdoor enclosure with a solar-powered coop, horned cows looked out from their pen and a group of piglets huddled around their feed.
Arink started out as a more conventional, intensive farmer in the mid-1980s. Then he visited a smaller organic farm and saw how animals could be raised with limited use of chemical fertilisers and antibiotics. He said:
“On my way back home, I thought, well, that’s the direction I want to go with my farm. In the 30 years after that, that’s what we did here.”
The Netherlands – a country around one-third the size of England – is the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural goods, behind the US. Overall in the Netherlands, average farm sizes are getting bigger, but the number of farms is shrinking.
In recent years, the Dutch government had to develop plans to substantially reduce nitrogen emissions from, among other things, manure and chemical fertilisers on farms.
In 2022, the government set targets to cut nitrogen pollution by as much as 70% in some areas by the end of this decade. A voluntary “buy out” scheme for farms is among the measures aimed to reach this goal.
Protests kicked off in 2019 in response to the nitrogen crisis and demonstrations continued over the past few years.
On these protests and the wider farmer outcry across Europe this year, Arink believes that many farmers “cannot look over the hill” to a possible future producing less meat and more plants. He added:
“In Holland, we have some kind of a mantra that says the intensive way of producing milk and meat is very efficient. But it is not when you calculate all of the indirect dues of materials and energy.
“Maybe from the financial point of view, it can be efficient, but we have to look at it in the ecological way. And from that point of view, it’s very inefficient.”
Government formation talks remain ongoing in the Netherlands, months after the country’s general election last November. The next government will be tasked with enforcing the nitrogen reduction measures in the coming years. Arink said:
“That [nitrogen] problem is not to be solved only by farmers, but the whole society.”
News and views
REEF RIFT: Coral reefs around the world are on the brink of a fourth mass bleaching event, which “could see wide swathes of tropical reefs die”, Reuters reported. This follows “months of record-breaking ocean heat fuelled by climate change and the El Niño climate pattern”, the newswire added. Bleaching is triggered by heat stress and “can be devastating for the ocean ecosystem”, Reuters said. Dr Derek Manzello, the coordinator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s coral reef monitoring authority, told the outlet: “We are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet.” Australia’s Great Barrier Reef “lost nearly a third of its corals” during the last global bleaching between 2014 and 2017, the newswire noted.
RISK FACTOR: The EU is planning to delay its deforestation-risk rating system for countries, which was due to take effect at the end of this year, according to the Financial Times. The law aims to prevent the sale of products that have been produced on deforested land. The rules would categorise countries as posing either a low, standard or high risk for deforestation. Three EU officials told the FT that all countries will be listed as “standard risk, to give them more time to adapt”. The newspaper said that the change came after “several governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America complained that the rules would be burdensome, unfair and scare off investors”. The European Commission declined to comment, the FT said. (Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A on the law for more.)
NIGERIA’S ‘BLUE CARBON’: A mangrove-restoration carbon credit project received an early green light in an “oil-rich Nigerian state”, Bloomberg reported. A UK-based company, Serendib Capital, was granted the rights “to restore the mangroves and seagrass beds” on about 9% of land in Delta State, in southern Nigeria. The outlet said that the project developer claimed this “could potentially sequester, or store away, 5.32m tons of carbon each year”. Huge oil companies “have been blamed for much of the damage that’s historically destroyed the area’s wetlands and farms”, Bloomberg added, noting that “they, in turn, could now become some of the biggest buyers of carbon offsets”. Parts of the carbon offset market have “cooled recently amid increasingly sharp criticism from scientists and experts”, the outlet said.
FARMERS RALLY ON: “Thousands of angry farmers” threw smoke bombs and lit fires near parliament buildings in Warsaw as EU farmer protests continued, Al Jazeera said. Polish farmers demonstrated against EU rules and “cheap Ukraine imports”, according to the outlet, adding that there were also “tractor blockades on roads across the country”. The country’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, “failed to reach an agreement with Polish farmers to end protests”, Euronews reported. Separately, ITV News said that farmers in Wales lined “thousands of wellies…on the steps of the Senedd [parliament] in protest against the Welsh government’s new farming plans”.
AFRICAN AGRI: A report from civil-society groups criticised a $61bn plan to “industrialise African food systems”, saying it would pose a “significant threat to small-scale farmers”, Mongabay reported. The African Development Bank (AfDB) recently released “agricultural development plans” for 40 African countries, aiming to improve food security and productivity. The groups said the initiative’s “emphasis on principal commodity crops, mechanised farming tools and standardised land tenure systems” push towards agro-industrialisation, Mongabay said. The outlet added that the groups believe this would “increase dependency on multinational corporations for seeds and agrochemicals, and lead to the loss of land and biodiversity”. The AfDB did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment.
COASTAL VILLAGE THREAT: Coastal villages in the east of India that were “hit hard by a super-cyclone” 25 years ago have since experienced “a rise in soil and water salinity and subsequent loss of agricultural land, livelihoods and marriage prospects”, according to the Migration Story. The outlet spoke to residents in the villages of Udaykani and Tandahar about the continuing impacts of the super-cyclone that “lashed” the state of Odisha in 1999, which was the “most intense ever recorded in the northern Indian Ocean”. One villager, Vaidehi Kardi, told the outlet: “When the soil turned salty, our crops shrivelled…Gradually, the water, too, turned salty and our lives withered.”
Watch, read, listen
GREEN BURIALS: In a podcast, National Public Radio examined sustainable burials and how costly they can be for your wallet and the planet.
AN OPTION FOR BELIZE: Inside Climate News looked at a “fevered push” from conservationists to “save what’s left” of the tropical rainforest in Belize through carbon offsets.
‘ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMES’: The Diplomat interviewed Prof John McManus, a professor at the University of Miami, to talk about environmental damage in the South China Sea.
‘GREEN GOLD’: In a Financial Times long read, the newspaper’s Brazil bureau chief Bryan Harris explored the agriculture and agribusiness “boomtowns” in the central-west parts of Brazil.
New science
Australia’s Tinderbox Drought: An extreme natural event likely worsened by human-caused climate change
Science Advances
Climate change made low rainfall levels during an “extreme and impactful” drought in Australia from 2017-19 “around six times more likely”, compared to pre-industrial times, new research suggested. This drought “helped create favourable conditions for the most intense and widespread outbreak of forest fires ever recorded in south-east Australia”, the study said. The researchers looked at the characteristics and causes of the “tinderbox drought” in south-east Australia and used modelling to assess how unusual the drought was compared to “natural climate variability”. They found multiple ways in which human-caused climate change may have worsened the drought, but said that other aspects of the drought were “unexpected”.
Bornean tropical forests recovering from logging at risk of regeneration failure
Global Change Biology
When logged forests are restored, they have higher seedling mortality compared to unlogged forests, new research has found. Over a year and a half, researchers examined the diversity, survival and characteristics of more than 5,000 seedlings of 15 species in northern Borneo. Some of the seeds germinated in unlogged forests and some in forests that were logged 30-35 years ago and were subsequently restored either naturally or with restoration techniques such as tree planting. They found that both restoration types had lower species richness and evenness than unlogged forests five-to-six months after the trees began to produce stems.
Giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in the UK: carbon storage potential and growth rates
Royal Society Open Science
A new study revealed that giant sequoias planted in the UK can absorb carbon between 2.5 and 20 times faster than other tree species commonly planted on plantations. The researchers used laser scanning to calculate the above-ground biomass and annual biomass accumulation rates of individual giant sequoia trees at three different sites. They found that the UK trees grew at similar rates as those in the US, “varying with climate, management and age”. The study said that giant sequoias are one of the country’s largest tree species and have “undoubted public appeal”. It added that they “represent a small but potentially important addition to the UK’s carbon sequestration efforts”.
In the diary
- 15 March: Third meeting of the informal advisory group on benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources | Online
- 11-13 March: 11th annual World Ocean Summit and Expo | Lisbon
- 18-29 March: First part of the 29th session of the International Seabed Authority | Kingston, Jamaica
- 21 March: International Day of Forests
- 22 March: World Water Day
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 13 March 2024: Drought hits food supplies; ‘Mass bleaching’ of coral reefs; Industrialising African ag appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes