Change now or endanger climate
♦ UN report highlights the need to protect the remaining tropical forests
♦ It offered a hope that reforestation and biofuel schemes alone can offset environmental damage
Humanity faces increasingly painful trade-offs between food security and rising temperatures within decades unless it curbs emissions and stops unsustainable farming and deforestation, a landmark climate assessment said yesterday.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that efforts to limit global warming while feeding a booming population could be wrecked without swift and sweeping changes to how we use the land we live off.
Its report on land use and climate change highlighted the need to protect remaining tropical forests as a bulkhead against future warming.
But it offered a sobering take on the hope reforestation and biofuel schemes alone can offset mankind’s environmental damage.
It cautioned that these mega-projects could endanger food security, underlining that reducing emissions will be central to averting disaster.
“This is a perfect storm. Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency,” said Dave Reay, Professor of Carbon Management at the University of Edinburgh.
Land is intimately linked to climate. With its forests, plants and soil it sucks up and stores around one third of all man-made emissions.
Intensive exploitation of these resources also produces huge amounts of planet-warming CO2, methane and nitrous oxide, while agriculture guzzles up 70 percent of Earth’s freshwater supply. As the global population balloons towards 10 billion by mid-century, how land is managed by governments, industry and farmers will play a key role in limiting or accelerating the worst excesses of climate change.
“Land is where we live,” IPCC co-chair Hoesung Lee said during the report’s launch yesterday.
“Land is under growing human pressure and land is part of the solution, but land cannot do it all.”
The IPCC is the world’s leading authority on climate change. Last year it warned that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius -- the optimal level aimed for in the Paris climate deal -- would be impossible without a drastic drawdown in greenhouse gas emissions.
The land use report warned that any delay in reductions -- across industry, transport, agriculture and infrastructure -- “would lead to increasingly negative impacts on land and reduce the prospect of sustainable development”.
It also presented a string of looming trade-offs in using land for climate change mitigation.
Forests, an enormous carbon sink, can be regenerated to cool the planet. But with industrial farming covering a third of land today, there’s limited space.
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