The very real threat that climate change poses to agriculture is first and foremost in the minds of many smallholder farmers. But what if the actions they take to respond make the situation even worse?
Global warming may deliver more frequent and devastating pest infestations. Rising global temperatures will lead to heat stress lowering crop yields. Elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere could make the foods we consume less nutritious. Now, there is emerging concern among some scientists that farmers’ responses to these attacks on agriculture could end up exacerbating climate change.
For example, farmers will be tempted to employ more harsh chemical pesticides to fight pest plagues. Meanwhile, falling yields could see more industrial synthetic fertilizers being manufactured and spread on fields, increasing emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Increasingly industrialized responses to climate threats will add more CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming. The result would be a sort of feedback loop.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls these “maladaptation risks” and discusses the challenge at length in its IPCC Working Group II report on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, part of that organization’s Sixth Assessment Report.
“There is increased evidence of maladaptation across many sectors and regions,” the IPCC warned. “Maladaptive responses to climate change can create lock-ins of vulnerability, exposure, and risks that are difficult and expensive to change and exacerbate existing inequalities,” meaning the most vulnerable among us, including smallholder farmers, will suffer the most from the blowback.
IPCC worries that farmers everywhere, including smallholder farmers, will end up relying too much on climate-unfriendly farming practices and technologies to give them temporary relief from global warming’s onslaughts. Ultimately, this will only make the problem worse.
April is Earth Month, and in recognition of this we’re highlighting our interest at Grow Further in ensuring that the agricultural innovations we support leave only the lightest of footprints on our planet.
We are aware of maladaptation risks and how smallholder farmers could inadvertently end up making the climate change crisis worse—whether it’s through additional deforestation, farming practices that degrade soils, or through their increasing use of and demand for industrial agricultural products. Thus, we insist that the research concepts that cross our desk incorporate sustainability in their designs.
The climate crisis is very real, and it’s getting worse. Farmers will have to adapt, but in the right ways. The cure can’t be worse than the disease.
Avoiding maladaptation
One means of tackling crop diseases and pest infestations made more acute by global warming is through early detection—eliminating threats before they fester and become widespread. Our grant in Tanzania aims to achieve this using the power of machine learning.
The researchers we are funding in northern Tanzania are developing an innovative smartphone application that will alert farmers to emerging pest and disease threats. It will do this by analyzing photographs taken of different parts of potentially infected plants. This app will also offer recommendations on how to mitigate or even entirely eliminate these problems with a minimum of chemicals.
Most smallholder farms are found in the tropics. The crops grown there generally do well in warmer climates, but even tropical plants suffer from excess heat and other effects of climate change.
Many farmers will be tempted to turn to synthetic fertilizers to maintain yields and incomes, even if it means they must invest more in these inputs. However, this simply isn’t sustainable. Temperatures will continue to rise and the cost of synthetic fertilizers will likely rise in tandem. Plus, overuse of fertilizers can cause salinization and other problems over time.
Grow Further isn’t opposed to synthetic fertilizers, but we hope innovators can find ways to lessen smallholder farmers’ reliance on these or to find much cheaper, eco-friendly alternatives. Sometimes, these alternative fertilizers can be found in nature. Otherwise, researchers may uncover innovative ways for farmers to make their own effective organic fertilizers from crop waste or dung from the animals they care for.
“Maladaptive responses to climate change can create lock-ins of vulnerability, exposure, and risks that are difficult and expensive to change.”
Better medicine for climate change
There are strong incentives for farmers and the governments that support them to expand agricultural production and yields by simply expanding the area of land under cultivation. This is the ultimate maladaptive risk we face as a species.
The Green Revolution resulted in huge gains in output per hectare in places like Mexico, India, Pakistan, and beyond. Unfortunately, much of the world missed out on this revolution, especially sub-Saharan Africa. While farmers in the US have allowed farmland to return to forest as yields increase, many other parts of the world are still experiencing deforestation.
Deforestation contributes to climate change but also makes it more difficult for us to mitigate the impact of rising levels of CO2 because there are fewer trees to absorb it out of the atmosphere. A better way forward is to help these farmers grow more food on land they are already farming on, negating any need for additional forest clearing.
Projects funded by Grow Further in Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia each fulfill this vision in different ways. In Ghana, our efforts to realize the world’s first commercial variety of Bambara groundnut is focused on encouraging farmers to plant this high-yielding, energy and nutrition-rich legume on the hectares they’re already tending to. In Zimbabwe, we’re helping our partners develop varieties of iron-rich pearl millet that are designed to do well in that nation’s changing climatic conditions, including during droughts. And in Ethiopia, Grow Further and our allies are aiding government efforts to see wheat production occur year-round rather than only during the rainy season, and on existing wheat farms.
Better food security and better nutrition for all are critical goals but cannot be pursued at the expense of the environment. In the long term, they cannot be achieved while exacerbating climate change.
— Grow Further
Photo credit: A farm worker in Jalisco, Mexico tends to crops growing in a greenhouse under punishing heat stress. Rafael Duarte/International Labor Organization and Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).