UN Report Calls for Transforming Land Practices to Battle Hunger and 'Suffocating Blanket of Climate Emergency'
A landmark United Nations report released Thursday warns that land worldwide is under mounting pressure from humans—both exacerbated by and contributing to the climate crisis—which underscores the need to urgently enact more sustainable land practices and curb greenhouse gas emissions from all sources to keep the global population fed and ensure a habitable planet in the future.
“The world must take immediate action to transform the way we use our land—forestry, agriculture, industrial and urban development—in order to avoid a climate catastrophe.”
—Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, NRDC
The Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. body that assesses science related to the climate crisis. The report’s Summary for Policymakers (pdf) was agreed on by world governments at a meeting in Geneva earlier this week and published Thursday.
“Land plays an important role in the climate system,” Jim Skea, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III—which focuses on mitigating climate change—explained in a statement. “Agriculture, forestry, and other types of land use account for 23 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time natural land processes absorb carbon dioxide equivalent to almost a third of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry.”
In other words, when it comes to the human-caused climate emergency land use is part of the problem—and part of the solution.
As Susan Casey-Lefkowitz wrote in a blog post for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Thursday, the SRCCL signals that “the world must take immediate action to transform the way we use our land—forestry, agriculture, industrial and urban development—in order to avoid a climate catastrophe.”
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“This is a perfect storm,” Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who was an expert reviewer for the IPCC report, told The Guardian. “Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency. Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat.”
As the The New York Times reported, the 107 scientists from 52 countries who authored the SRCCL “found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly.”
In a statement, Priyadarshi Shukla, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, warned that certain regions of the world are especially at risk because of rising temperatures.
“Food security will be increasingly affected by future climate change through yield declines—especially in the tropics—increased prices, reduced nutrient quality, and supply chain disruptions,” Shukla said. “We will see different effects in different countries, but there will be more drastic impacts on low-income countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.”
While the IPCC report’s findings are dire, its authors are hopeful that the conclusions will spur global action to improve land management with the dual aims of combating global heating and hunger.
“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Rosenzweig told the Times. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
Casey-Lefkowitz, in her blog post for NRDC, outlined the solutions offered in the report. “To mitigate climate change, save wildlife, and secure our food supply, we need transformative change to our economy and our current practices,” she wrote.
The transformative change referenced by Casey-Lefkowitz means:
- protecting major areas of our lands and oceans around the world;
- restoration of natural ecosystems, such as our forests;
- we need to change the way we grow our food;
- eating in a way that is healthier for our climate;
- that we need to stop burning our forests for fuel; and
- assessing truly clean energy development options at a landscape scale.
Debra Roberts, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II—which focuses on the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change—explained that “some dietary choices require more land and water, and cause more emissions of heat-trapping gases than others.”
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