Europe refuses to get soil on its hands

UK Guardian
David Cronin
Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The other evening I had an experience of mundane magic. At the early age of 38, I ate the first vegetable that I had grown all by myself. It was a humble scallion yet on my tongue it had a tang of pride and achievement.

How many of the EU’s environment ministers who will gather in Luxembourg this Thursday produce their own food? I’m not asking that question because I think that my success story with organic scallions suddenly gives me greener credentials than the political masters of this continent. I ask it because I doubt that many of them feel any emotional connection to soil, judging by the cavalier way they disregard it.

Three years ago, the European commission proposed a legal framework for soil protection. Three years later, it is at risk of being consigned to the compost heap as a small but powerful group of EU governments are refusing to approve it. Britain, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands are all opposed to the plan, claiming either that implementing it would be too onerous or that soil is a matter best left for national administrations.

The reasons cited for rejecting the blueprint are spurious. Far from being too onerous, the proposal does not go far enough in obliging governments to protect a resource that none of us can live without. Politicians or civil servants from regions with poor soil quality have no reason to fear that Brussels bureaucrats will ambush them with subpoenas. Instead of urgent action, the law would simply require governments to identify areas afflicted by such problems as soil erosion and salinisation (the accumulation of salt) and to compile an inventory of contaminated sites, along with plans to rehabilitate such land.

The soil protection saga is a troubling testament to how the EU’s approach to the environment suffers from compartmentalised thinking. Whereas binding laws have been introduced on air and water, the union lacks similar rules on soil. Any clever child would be able to tell you that all these things are intimately connected. But allegedly well-educated officials and politicians can’t grasp that it’s foolish to try to protect one while neglecting the others.

Britain’s reluctance to endorse the plan offers yet another example of how hollow the rhetoric of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments on climate change has been. Cared for properly, soil can act as a carbon “sink”, absorbing about one-fifth of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide. When soil is damaged, however, the pattern is reversed and rather than soaking up CO2, it releases it. Each year British soil loses about 0.6% of its organic matter and the resulting increase in CO2 emissions would be roughly equivalent to putting an extra five million cars on the road. This problem has been acute for several decades: between 1980 and 1995 British soil lost 18% of its organic matter. In 2004, the Environment Agency stated that the degradation caused to soil in England and Wales due to such factors as intensive agriculture and mismanagement of forests (during road construction and harvesting) was unsustainable.

Across the EU, thousands of sites have been polluted because of reckless industrial practices; nobody is sure of the full extent of this damage as there is a paucity of data about soil. The commission, meanwhile, reckons that soil degradation deprives the EU economy of €38bn per annum and that’s probably a conservative estimate.

Soil cannot be shielded from further deterioration by token gestures. A comprehensive and effective strategy would have to grapple with reforms of agricultural and industrial policy and a more sensible attitude to waste management (as I’ve learned from my limited experiments in the garden, composting can be of vital importance in keeping soil fertile). Not only does that strategy seem distant, though, our governments also can’t even agree on minimal rules. It is difficult not to despair.

Report: Agriculture holds the key to solving global warming

Green Right Now
Barbara Kessler
Wednesday, 3 June, 2009

Agriculture, so often cited as a factor in global decline – for claiming natural grasslands that store carbon, soil erosion and pesticide runoff – could become a big part of the solution to global warming, according to a hopeful report by Worldwatch Institute released today.

Innovations in food production and land use that are ready to be put to work could reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to roughly 25 percent of global fossil fuel emissions and be managed to reduce carbon already in the atmosphere as well, according to WWI and Ecoagriculture Partners.

Carbon capture technology remains unproven and will take a decade at least to put into operation. By contrast, agricultural and land use management practices that are ready today could be employed to sequester carbon through photosynthesis by growing and sustaining more plants.

To understand how and why the agricultural approach to climate change must be a part of the solution, the public first needs to recognize that the world must “go negative” with carbon emissions – producing fewer than it churns out to reach the necessary reductions by 2050, said Sara Scherr, co-author with Sajal Sthapit of the report, Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use.

Policymakers must go beyond improving energy efficiency and scaling up renewables and add ways to pull down emissions from forestry and agriculture operations.

More than 30 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gases are linked to agriculture and land use, notes the report, which rivals the combined emissions of the transportation and industry sectors.

The report outlines five ways to reduce and sequester carbon using farming strategies:

* Enriching soil carbon. Soil, the third largest carbon pool on Earth’s surface, can be managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by minimizing tillage, cutting use of nitrogen fertilizers, and preventing erosion. Soils can store a vast amount of additional carbon by building up organic matter and by burying carbon in the form of biochar (biomass burned in a low-oxygen environment).

* Farming with perennials. Two-thirds of all arable land is used to grow annual grains, but there is large potential to substitute these with perennial trees, shrubs, palms, and grasses that produce food, livestock feed, and fuel. These perennials maintain and develop their roots and branches over many years, storing carbon in the vegetation and soil.

* Climate-friendly livestock production. Livestock accounts for nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land use. Innovations such as rotational grazing, manure management, methane capture for biogas production, and improved feeds and feed additives can reduce livestock-related emissions.

* Protecting natural habitat. Deforestation, land clearing, and forest and grassland fires are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Incentives are needed to encourage farmers, ranchers, and foresters to maintain natural forest and grassland habitats through product certification, payments for climate services, securing tenure rights, and community fire control.

* Restoring degraded watersheds and range lands. Restoring vegetation on vast areas of degraded land can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while making land productive again, protecting critical watersheds, and alleviating rural poverty.