Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs recently participated in a public speaking engagement at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey. His talk mainly focused on trade and economics, but Sachs also spoke of his time directing Columbia’s Earth Institute and its work on climate change. Reflecting on his time there, Professor Sachs explained the climate situation better than this author ever could. In a nutshell: “It’s much worse than we have thought,” he said.
“The world’s temperature has gone up by 0.3 degrees Celsius in three years. We have had 21 months of the last 22 above 1.5 degrees,” Sachs told the audience. “We’re rising at an accelerating rate.”
He repeated the repeated warnings of climate scientists: global average temperatures are increasing at a rate of about 0.3 to 0.4 degrees Celsius per decade, so the world will soon reach an average temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius. “What all of this means is profound danger 20 years from now…but we’re already seeing terrible danger today,” Sachs added, referring to recent wildfire disasters in California, South Korea, and beyond.
Of all the threats to food security, climate change is the most serious. It has already been linked to more frequent and stronger droughts. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and this leads to torrential rains and flash flooding swamping farms. There is also evidence that climate change is contributing to worsening pest infestations, including a locust swarm that devastated farms in parts of Pakistan and India a few years back. But that’s not all.
Science is still discovering different ways that climate change threatens smallholder farmers, with new findings emerging every year. Grow Further is working to get ahead of them. The projects we’re now sponsoring are designed to help farmers adapt to climate change and all the known and unknown problems that it will bring.
Heat stress
The world has benefited enormously from huge gains in agricultural output thanks to agricultural innovation. Yet, yield increases would’ve been even greater were it not for global warming. And because temperatures are rising so quickly, farm yields have hit a wall. This is mainly because of heat stress.
Crops like sorghum, maize, and millets do well at higher temperatures, one reason why they are cultivated in the tropics. But when conditions get too hot even these warm-weather crops steadily perform worse and yields decline. This is the result of heat stress and is the situation facing farmers in places like Ethiopia. Our grant there tackles the threat of heat stress in two different ways.
Ethiopia is a huge producer and consumer of wheat, but its wheat farms are feeling the rising heat. There is little hope of boosting rain-fed farm yields via existing practices with temperatures increasing at the pace that Sachs mentioned. So, Ethiopia’s government is looking to make wheat there farming a year-round affair by adding irrigation.
We believe this is a good plan. That’s why we’re funding a project with Ethiopian agricultural scientists to develop production techniques to optimize a new irrigated off-season. This innovation won’t halt temperature increases or make wheat immune to heat stress. But together, they will help boost yields across Ethiopia, making the country more resilient to climate change than it otherwise might be in the future.
CO2 fertilization
“Plants need CO2” was once a popular catchphrase touted by non-scientists opposing action on climate change, and it’s technically true. However, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing; that’s what scientists are now discovering with regards to rising levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.
“What all of this means is profound danger 20 years from now…but we’re already seeing terrible danger today,”
Yes, plants and food crops depend on CO2 to survive. Some crops, like rice, have been found to perform better under higher CO2 concentrations. But others don’t fare much better at all, and these crops tend to be cultivated in tropical agricultural zones—sorghum, millets, and maize, among others. In fact, these crops can be negatively impacted by higher CO2 concentrations because additional carbon dioxide makes them less nutritious.
Higher CO2 levels seem to inhibit certain crops’ intake of nitrogen, and this can lower protein content. Studies have also found that maize crops facing higher CO2 concentrations grow with lower amounts of essential minerals like iron, zinc, and calcium. There are other nutritional detriments to crops resulting from rising CO2 levels.
Lowering CO2 levels is expensive, but Grow Further has several low-cost projects to help farmers grow more nutritious crops even under rising CO2 levels.
In Ghana, we’re funding a project to develop the world’s first commercial variety of Bambara groundnut. This legume already boasts high protein content, as high as 25%, so even if more CO2 degrades this attribute somewhat there will still be plenty of it left in the edible parts of this plant. Bambara groundnuts are also a good source of iron, zinc, calcium, and potassium, among other vital minerals. And in Zimbabwe, Grow Further and our partners are working on developing and propagating pearl millet varieties fortified with additional iron content.
Iron-rich pearl millet and Bambara groundnuts have another attribute: they tolerate drier climates and are drought-resistant. Modeling shows that climate change will lead to longer, more severe, and more frequent droughts, so smallholder farmers will need to adapt by relying more on these kinds of drought-resistant crops.
Climate change will also deliver worsening heat stress on plants. Meanwhile, rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, the root of the climate crisis, tends to make plants produce more carbohydrates and less of other nutrients.
Mindful of these challenges, Grow Further is working on solutions, and we’re looking for more such innovative solutions to sponsor and see through the finish line. And it’s all made possible thanks to our donor-members and their generous support, so we thank you. Please help us spread the word.
— Grow Further
Photo credit: Drought-parched earth at the usually swampy Everglades. US National Park Service (public domain).