Page 107 - FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change

Appendix 01: Speakers’ summary notes
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Reducing demand for land. Over the long run, technological change has vastly increased agricultural productivity, and reduced the demand for land via intensification, thereby paving the way to forest transition in many parts of the world. A land sparing outcome consistent with the Borlaug hypothesis is dependent on market conditions, however, in which case intensification can augment the demand for land, at least in the short run. This appears to have occurred in Brazil, with the advance of soybean farming into the savanna regions of the Amazon Basin, in the State of Mato Grosso.
Integrating agriculture and ecology. A form of agro-ecological system producing abundant food while maintaining ecological function represents the ideal of a land sharing approach to downsizing the ecological footprint to sustainable dimensions. However, as already suggested, economies have tended to incentivize shifts away from ecologically-
based production, toward cost-minimizing, revenue maximizing monocultures. This shift is observable in forest-based extractive systems as well, most notably the recent move away from natural rubber production to small-scale livestock operations in the Amazon Basin.
Despite these unwelcome trends vis-à-vis ecosystem impact, there does exist the potential for managing the spatial occupation of new frontiers in a manner that minimizes biodiversity impacts. In particular, modelling studies have shown that the pattern of forest fragmentation stemming from specific road designs enables species mobility through landscape corridors, thereby mitigating the impact of climate changes on biodiversity. Further, the spatial configuration of protected areas at regional scale regulates continental rainfall regimes in the face of deforestation. Here, modelling studies have identified a configuration capable of sustaining rainfall across the Amazon basin, even with extreme encroachments of agriculture into the closed moist forest.
Ecosystem services and natural capital
A great deal of interest has emerged recently in protecting natural areas and resident ecosystems by invoking the concept of natural capital, and the ecosystem services thus provided. In fact, this represents a form of reducing
the demand for land, but I treat it separately from intensification given it valorizes natural land cover and operates independently from technological change in agriculture. The ecosystem service concept was developed and first applied by the ecologist, Howard Odum, who recycled sewage effluent in cypress domes rather than municipal treatment plants. Although the cypress ecosystem functioned as predicted, the wastewater treatment values failed to compensate alternative use by the mulch industry, and hardly any old growth cypress remains in the experimental region. The same problem is observed in the Amazon Basin, where land values in agriculture are significantly greater than what the market pays for carbon sequestration. For the ground-level land manager, the opportunity cost of providing the ecosystem service is simply too high, in which case incentives give way to agricultural land use, typically for livestock operations.
The sustainability bridge to peaceful coexistence
The long-run suppression of ecosystems by agricultural activity is attributable to the efficiency of modern technologies, and the demand for product standards and supply regularity. Reversing the historical trend, and crossing the sustainability bridge to a form of integrated eco-agriculture, or to a level of productivity sufficient to precipitate
global land sparing, will not be easy. That climate change has begun to manifest adds urgency and complexity to
the task ahead. It is in this context that I call attention to the issue of time-scale, given much of the policy discussion remains insensitive to the pace of the processes now unfolding. I first note the cogent view expressed by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) regarding the efficiency of risk reduction relative to disaster relief, which counsels us to be proactive rather than reactive in dealing with the challenges confronting us with respect to agriculture and human welfare. In this regard, it is important to consider recent admonitions by the US National Research Council
to prepare for a more rapid onset of climate change effects than originally expected. In particular, such effects could begin being felt within decades, perhaps even years. Although the rapid onset discussion refers to climate change, I wish to extend it to the competition between agriculture and ecosystems for land, a competition that nature is losing ever more quickly. The literature on the Anthropocene points not only to the disaster of a looming uptick in average global temperature, but also to a mass extinction of species, spearheaded by the agricultural advance on natural habitats and by extractive activities. Many of us have lived through or experienced the loss of entire ecosystems in our own lifetimes, which is to say we all have personal proof of a decadal pace of ecological degradation. The gathering force of climate change will accelerate this, in which case we need to confront the possibility that the technological and institutional changes we need to reduce the ecological footprint once-and-for-all will take too long.
It is in light of these considerations that I propose a two-pronged approach to building the sustainability bridge, one
FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change, land use and food security