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| Climate Smart Agriculture |
From what is obtainable, the world is going green. In a short while, products would be assessed by standard organizations based on their compliance with green codes. Any one found wanting would be placed on a danger list and may even be denied of some trade benefits. How prepared is Nigeria in this regard? AgroNigeria writes:
Climate and agriculture are like Siamese twins; as the survival of one is largely dependent on the other. So, the ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ (CSA) being propagated by Conference of Parties – COP 21- among others, is germane and highly apt for the advancement of agriculture in Nigeria.
Carbon emissions immensely contribute to climate change, and these can have serious consequences on humans and their environment. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, carbon emissions, in the form of carbon dioxide, make up more than 80 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted in the United State.
Carbon Emissions: Agriculture’s Albatross
Changing weather affects the agricultural industry and human food supply. Thus, carbon emissions invariably contribute to increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation, changing the growing conditions for food crops in many areas. These emissions raise global temperatures by trapping solar energy in the atmosphere. This in effect, alters water supply, weather pattern, changes the growing season for food crops and threatens coastal communities with increasing sea levels.
According to the United States Global Change Research Program, carbon emissions are causing warming in California’s Central Valley that is projected to significantly reduce the yields of tomatoes, wheat, rice, maize and sunflowers in this region.
Major changes in crop yield will expectedly cause food prices to rise around the world. In addition, climate change influenced by carbon emissions forces animals – many of which are hunted as food – to migrate to higher altitudes or northern habitats as the climate warms.
The determination to ensure a reduction of carbon emissions’ effect on agricultural products among others, gave rise to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 21 which held in Paris, France, last December.
COP 21 to the Rescue
The world forum was a crucial one because of the need to reduce global warming to below 2°C . Building on the achievement of COP 20 held in Lima, Peru, COP 21 sought to make an even greater international commitment towards climate change.
With this in mind, an agreement tagged ‘Paris Agreement’ was birthed at the conference. It was adopted by member states to reduce emissions, as part of the methods for reducing greenhouse gas.
According to France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, the agreement is an “ambitious and balanced” plan and a ‘historic turning point” in the goal of reducing global warming.
The conference which centred on global warming, climate change, climate smart agriculture and renewable energy, considered amongst other things, the import of climate change on food security as a result of altered growing season, rainfall patterns and flood disaster. The place of renewable energy as critical mitigation strategy in climate change was also deliberated upon.
The birth of the conference was sequel to the international political response to climate change which began at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where the ‘Rio Convention’ included the adoption of the UN Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
This convention set out a framework of action aimed at stabilising atmospheric concentrations of Green House Gases (GHGs) to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The UNFCCC, which entered into force on 21 March, 1994, now has a near-universal membership of 195 parties. The main objective of the annual Conference of Parties (COP) is to review the Convention’s implementation.
The first COP took place in Berlin in 1995; and significant meetings since then have included COP3, where the Kyoto Protocol was adopted; COP11, where the Montreal Action Plan was produced, COP15, in Copenhagen, where an agreement to success Kyoto Protocol was unfortunately not realized; and COP17 in Durban, where the Green Climate Fund was created.
Speaking on the importance of COP, Director, Carbon Exchange Trade, Lagos, Mr Innocent Azih noted that the conference provided a platform for the meeting of parties who have been on negotiation for climate change agreement for 21 years.
“At the conference, countries were asked to put projects, policies and programmes that could ensure that by 2020, reports will be brought in and reviewed by 2025,” Azih added. For CNN columnist, John Sutter, “the accord, which came out of the COP21 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been years, if not decades, in the making.
“It is a bold signal to boardrooms and national capitals around the world. The era of fossil fuels is over, and we’re moving toward cleaner, (safer and healthier) sources of energy fast,” he declared.
Internationally, agriculture is gradually gravitating towards climate smart practices, in order to mitigate carbon emissions and increase agricultural output. Climate Smart Agriculture therefore seeks to lead the trend in food security and availability.
CSA Is The Key
Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is the practice of achieving increased agricultural productivity and yields in ways that ensure adaptation to climatic changes, while reducing gaseous emissions from on-farm and off-farm agricultural activities. It is basically about increasing agricultural production sustainably, adapting and building resilience to climate change challenges and also mitigating its impacts by reducing or removing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere.
Crop and livestock production is a major source of GHGs emission. Since C02 causes 80 percent of the emissions that trap solar energy and raise global temperature, there is a consensus that a smarter way of increasing productivity and yield need to be employed, to ensure food security without compromising environmental security.
Agriculture is known to contribute about 24 percent of carbon emissions, particularly with respect to Land Use Charge. Other sub-sector contributions come from livestock, manure, mineral fertilizer, rice and so on.
Food supply security is an underpinning issue in climate effect on agriculture. This is because, apart from climate itself, water, energy and other resources are critical ingredients for farming that have direct interaction with climatic dynamics. Given that two percent of agricultural yields could be reduced every decade, an estimated world population of 9 billion by 2050 may face hunger and famine if agricultural productivity does not exceed 60 percent per annum. Therefore, a sustainable world will have to implement smarter strategies in agricultural production to ensure this goal is achieved.
Current tillage and livestock rearing systems cause emissions. In addition, both intensive and extensive farming systems are equally problematic. While extensive farming cause deforestation, intensive farming expose the soil, release gases trapped in the soil while the attendant intensive fertilizer use also cause heavy gas release, especially methane into the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, agricultural intensification, though known for high damage to the environment, is confirmed to be capable of solving the productivity and yield as well as deforestation problem, preventing up to 590 billion tons of carbon emissions between 1961 and 2005.
What Makes CSA Smart?
Three keys achievable from CSA are food security, adaptation and mitigation. This approach seeks to support countries and other actors in securing the necessary policies.
The smart practice involves the optimized resource use to grow more crops. This will include using just about the right amount of water, acres of land and amounts of fertilizer per yield of crop. It will also apply to livestock and address the issue of Land Use Charge.
Opposition had come from international civil society against the movement by the Global Alliance of Climate Smart Agriculture (GACSA), particularly with respect to its welcoming major culprits in agriculture emissions with its attendant contribution to climate change. Action Aid for instance, criticized GACSA for allowing global fertilizer corporation appear to be champions of CSA, when indeed they represent the major culprits.
GACSA has responded that it wasn’t a means of endorsing the corporation for such contributions, but a way to build coalitions towards capturing the carbon footprints in agriculture and strategically reducing it.
Nigeria’s Climate: A Concern for All!
Nigeria might not be said to have the worst carbon emission in her climate, but it definitely has a role to play in the reduction of current untoward practices.
“Nigeria is not one of the major emitters but the country is vulnerable. The emissions that happen in industrial environments hit Nigeria more,” Azih noted.
He further enumerated practices such as “desertification, usage of fossil fuel in intense ways, gas flaring, wood felling and so forth, as some of the factors that affect the environment and the productivity of the people; the rising sea level, which also affects the coastal regions; in fact, the vulnerability cuts across almost all the economic sectors,” he said.
Also speaking on climate change, Charles Iyare, an environmental monitoring and evaluation officer was quoted as saying “Nigeria is currently faced with adverse climate conditions that already have negative impacts on the welfare of millions of people.
“There are persistent droughts and flooding, and excessive rains, resulting in disaster around the country. The flood disaster in 2012 affected a lot of people in Nigeria especially women and children, while 363 people were killed, and over two million were internally displaced. In essence, the socio-economic consequences of climate change in the agricultural sector can be best imagined than experienced.”
Climate change definitely must be an issue of concern to not just the government, but also stakeholders in agriculture and the general populace. Just as policies are to be expected from the government towards a better climate, stakeholders must also learn to be environment-friendly and should be prepared to hold the government to its decisions.
CSA and Nigeria
In light of all these, Nigeria’s quest to adopt smart climate approach to agriculture might be seen to have received a boost by her presence at COP 21.
The country’s participation and assent to the Paris Agreement is a laudable step in the right direction, because this is the first time Nigeria would join others to make commitments to implementing policies and programmes that will result in 20 percent of Nigeria’s energy basket coming from renewable energy by 2030.
The strong delegation led by the president of the federation, Muhammadu Buhari and Minister of Environment, Mrs Amina Mohammed, a former staff of the United Nations as Senior Special Assistant to the Secretary General on MDGs might elicit some level of hope.
Nevertheless, the extent to which this agreement will be implemented in Nigeria remains to be seen. The Carbon Exchange Trade is Nigeria’s only voluntary and private-directed platform that links carbon emitting activities with clean projects activities and investments such as renewable energy projects. It is a technology-
driven framework that has created the opportunity for cleaning or offsetting of emissions that arise from home activities as well as those in manufacturing, transportation, agriculture and energy systems and other enterprises. It has created a carbon sink in renewable energy projects to absorb all pollutions.
This therefore increases the reduction of emissions from agriculture and particularly enables smart practices that promote solutions from on-farm through the food value chain, including renewable energy mainstreaming in the food and agriculture production.
The just concluded conference also had a session where Nigerian discussants such as Prof. Chinedu Nwajiuba, Nigeria Climate Change Study Action Team; Dr. Victor Fodeke of the African Climate Change Summit, Mr. Thiana Mahama, West Africa Director, ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE), Prof. Femi Ajibola, Managing Director, New Nigerian Foundation; Mr. Femi Oye, CEO of Green Energy and Biofuels and Innocent Azih, the Director of the Exchange brainstormed on the CET technology in Nigeria.
Besides, such an entity will be certified clean to the extent of its emission, offset and be able to receive venture investments and other benefits from the Global Carbon Fund, low premium cover from global insurance corporations and participation in global discourse on development, climate change and economy.
The Exchange also provides clean projects or activities the opportunities of also accessing finance from global Green Fund, through the registration of its emission replacement. The funding that global pollution offsets is available as compensation payments to clean or non-polluting projects anywhere in the economy. It is therefore pertinent that projects, businesses and organizations come over to register their activities at the Exchange, and this is free of charge.
Experts are of the opinion that the impact would get effective from the adaptation measures that will follow. It is expected that the government would formulate mainstream policies and programmes that would encourage more adaptations. According to Azih, “the climate smart agriculture being propagated is very important especially in the dairy farm operations.
“For example, if a dairy farmer can harness energy from the sun for his milk production process without having to burn fossil fuel, he would have helped the ecosystem in that way and made more profit,” he noted.
Is Nigeria Ready For CSA?
Nigeria has over the years been a signatory to several treaties. One of such is the 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security and the 10 percent national budget allocation to agriculture development; but up till now, the agreement has neither been honoured nor implemented.
Speaking on Nigeria’s repeated policy formulation practice, Azih highlighted that the COP 21 agreement assented to by President Buhari remains the “strongest commitment made by the country.” He further noted that “the President appears to be the first Nigerian leader at the conference since its inception to make commitment to attain 20 percent of renewable energy in the country’s energy needs by 2030.”
Azih however hinted that whatever happens to the agreement “will be assessed in 2020. If by that period there are no results to show, it means the presidency has failed in that regard. That is how policies are pinned down on its effectiveness,” Azih said.
Going by the action of President Buhari, he has successfully set a standard for all stakeholders and policy-makers in the country’s leadership framework to work on.
Towards Climate Smart Agriculture
Having been enjoined to take advantage of a climate smart approach to agriculture, it can be said that Nigeria might be on her way to food security, adaptation and mitigation.
The need to create awareness among citizens, corporate individuals and sector stakeholders is the way to go in order to achieve the desired result.
The government’s body language at this stage might be encouraging; nevertheless, more is expected if we are going to be seen as serious campaigners of a safer climate. With the new sheriff in town, time will definitely tell how serious Nigeria is, in adopting Climate Smart Agriculture.
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