Climate actions in a changing world

Climate and degraded lands

Until the end of the last century, climate change was perceived largely as a problem for future generations. The intensification of heatwaves and other extreme events, which we increasingly witness today, shows that this has now become an issue that needs to be dealt with in this generation.

Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) clearly states that the goal of the convention is to limit emissions and achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This must be achieved within a timeframe sufficient to maintain food production, safeguard ecosystem functions and allow sustainable socio-economic development. Nevertheless, the prime target of climate negotiations focused on emissions, with minimum reference to the large-scale problems of conflict and migration, cited above. This is a too-long neglected crucial point because, especially in the more fragile areas of the world, climate change is likely to lead to further degradation of land and agriculture, thus exacerbating the root causes of poverty, conflict and migration.

This will generate feedbacks that will further amplify the challenges of meeting the goals recently set globally under the Paris agreement and the 2030 Development Agenda. And yet, land-based mitigation is well recognized as a necessary option to reach climate stabilization (see, e.g. Smith et al., 2014), both in the short term, to help turn the current emission pathway from positive to negative growth, and in the long term, to ensure that in second half of this century total net anthropogenic emissions are zero or negative. Currently, agriculture and land use emissions, including deforestation, land degradation and fires, are responsible for about one-fourth of global emissions (Tubiello et al., 2015), but exhibit a much larger national share in many developing countries. No wonder that the majority of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted to date to UNFCCC critically include agriculture and land use in national action plans.

In this framework, it was shown recently that the weight of the land use and land cover change emissions is probably underestimated and could lead to a 1.5°C warming even in the absence of other emissions (Mahowald et al., 2017). Furthermore, the role of many so-called ‘natural climate solutions’ has been reassessed and re-emphasized (Griscom et al., 2017). Finally, it is worthwhile to note that national initiatives aimed at boosting carbon storage in agricultural soils have been recently launched: see, for instance, Rumpel et al. (2018).

Thus, among the various response actions that need to be undertaken to meet the multiple socio-economic challenges ahead of us, improvement in land management and tenure must play a central role, with a special focus on the maintenance and restoration of degraded areas and their production potential for food and other vital ecosystem services. The largest potential is in developing countries, where actions to restore degraded land, implement conservation practices in agriculture and forestry are the necessary ingredients to build resilient communities, create food security and employment, fight poverty, and where possible, generate emission reductions through healthy ecosystems, especially forests and agricultural soils (Smith et al., 2014).

A key element of the equation is therefore, decisively, land: widespread mismanagement of land areas turns them into a source of emissions, while healthy land would instead act as the most natural carbon absorption and storage mechanism. This primeval function of land can be revitalized on a vast scale in a surprisingly cost-effective way. For instance, the cost of rehabilitating a hectare of land is less than US$250 in a region such as the Sahel, as estimated by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD, 2014b).

Thus, we need a clear land-based strategy for climate change that can efficiently complement the needed reductions in greenhouse gases emissions from the energy sector. As a matter of fact, this strategy leads to advantages for enforcing stability and reducing migrations. It is a win-win strategy in our complex Earth System.

Mitigation advantages alone could justify the endeavor, but the most relevant aspect is that these actions on degraded soils trigger a cascade of significant side benefits. Especially if recovered lands are entrusted to small-scale farmers, they have the potential to generate, for instance (Mastrojeni and Pasini, 2017):

These gains are part of a coherent cycle of holistic balance, needed for an effective fight against climate change. Indeed, revitalized lands give rural communities – and entire nations – a concrete solution for improved livelihoods and natural resources, and out of the poverty trap that currently generates degradation, insecurity and conflict.

A call for action

The solution to the climate problem is not disjoint with the solution of other problems, which only apparently seem more localized, but actually heavily involve countries with instability, lack of safety and migrations. The actions in developing countries suffer, however, from lack of funding and new policies of closure. In our opinion, instead, we should carry these actions there. Why?

In our climate models, human actions are external drivers for climate change. However, considering geopolitical and conflict dynamics leads to discovery of new criticalities and feedbacks. For instance, the following vicious circle is evident: climate change – decreasing agricultural productivity – conflicts – migrations – land degradation – increased climate change (Mastrojeni and Pasini, 2017). In this situation the agricultural linkage seems very critical (Cai et al., 2016), and poverty itself does not allow poor countries to act to preserve environment, so triggering a new dangerous feedback. Of course, climate change is related especially to the industrial revolution, which led to an often unsustainable prosperity in developed countries, but also, at least in a certain percentage (difficult to be estimated), to situations of instability and global insecurity in poor countries (which reach developed countries, too).

We, of course, recognize the difficulties of achieving shared global solutions that require significant societal change at planetary scales. We observe nonetheless, with hope, that the global society has risen to tremendous global challenges before, whenever solutions jointly implementable by private and public actors existed, creating policy opportunities for decisive action. This was the case of the green revolution in the 1960s, and more recently the successful banning of CFCs in the 1990s under the Montreal Protocol. We see significant policy momentum at present, not least within the current Paris Agreement mechanisms, despite the many challenges: see, for instance, the papers by Rockström et al. (2017) and Figueres et al. (2017), from which one can clearly understand how significant are these challenges. Importantly, within the ongoing climate negotiations, helping developing countries to adapt and manage their territory must be a priority for action, with the explicit view of linking climate change solutions to achieving the SDG sustainable Agenda and in particular zero hunger, while reducing the often critical, natural-resources-related causes of migration, terrorism and conflicts.

We live in interesting times, characterized by many inter-related problems, but also by big challenges. In particular, for the first time our actions could converge to the solution of an environmental problem and more specifically human ones. The ‘projection’ of developed countries towards poor countries could trigger virtuous circles and avoid dangerous feedbacks. In our complex world, we should perform actions with a global view, rather than seeking local actions (such as building walls) lacking a global strategy, because the latter could exacerbate poverty, conflicts, terrorism and climate change, leading to a world we do not want for today and the next generations.