A Year of Extreme Weather, Skyrocketing Food Prices and Climate Change Debate
A Year of Extreme Weather, Skyrocketing Food Prices and Climate Change Debate
Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers
Continuing indecision about climate change, problems for the global economy, food price volatility and extreme weather events meant 2010 was a turbulent year for people all over the world.
Ordinary people continued their daily struggle with rising food and energy prices, job uncertainty and fears for their future sercurity in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown while news headlines seemed to suggest that there was little sign of any sense of urgency or common agreement on any of the big economic and environmental issues confronting the planet.
2010 was the UN’s Year of Biodiversity and pointed out there would be profound economic impacts to countries if efforts were not made to halt if. The message was reinforced by scientists at the independent International Institute for Environment Development, who said that biodiversity was key not just to life on Earth, but to economies and cultures, and “for the poor, who often depend directly on land and sea for subsistence, it is literally a lifeline.”
Only a month previously in Copenhagen the annual climate change talks had all but collapsed and it was plain there was much that urgently needed to be done but little optimism that politicians would rise to the challenges of agreeing on action to tackle this issue, or the unequal distribution of food and other resources that had pushed the numbers of people either starving or suffering from extreme malnutrition above 1 billion for the first time.
During the year the Haiti earthquake, extreme heat in Russia and then the enormous damage caused across Pakistan and China by the monsoon deluge suggested that the climate was becoming increasingly unstable.
It is argued that the resulting crop losses and fears of food scarcity contributed to speculation on commodity prices for staples like wheat and rice while at the same time agricultural production was stagnating.
Basic food prices continued to climb while governments, particularly in the “West” introduced tough spending cutbacks to try to recover from the huge budget deficits that had resulted from their earlier actions to try to contain the global economic crisis and prevent a total collapse of financial institutions.
It is difficult for an individual citizen, wherever they are in the world, to have any sense of perspective about such big issues, although inevitably they notice the impacts in their daily lives.
So at the end of the year, where are we?
There is growing consensus that there is a connection between climate change and food production, which has to increase and that agriculture needs to be sustainable, protecting the land and the environment for the future.
The next climate change talks in Cancun in November ended on a more positive notes with an agreement that efforts to protect forests, to provide a fund for the developing world to protect their environments and that the maximum global warming should be no more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
In December, a report, called Food Security, Farming, and Climate Change to 2050: Scenarios, Results, Policy Options from the Department for International Development in the UK, emphasised the connections between food security, poverty and climate change, stressing the need to address poverty today in order to help the poor in developing countries achieve food security and adapt to climate change.
It also found that improving crop productivity can counteract the negative effects of climate change on food production, prices, and access. International trade will also be essential in offsetting changes in the production and prices of key food commodities. In January the results of a year-long piece of research for the Dept for Business, Innovation and Skills will be released.
Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures will use leading edge scientific and other evidence and futures analysis to identify coming issues and possible policy options for the future of food and farming. One of its key objectives will be considering how new science, policies and interventions could best address future challenges and the practicalities of realising those policies and interventions.
Is it too much to hope that among these will be the new low-chem agricultural products from the biopesticides developers, harmonising the processes of licensing biopesticides, biofungicides and yield enhancers and making them available affordably to the millions of small and subsistence farmers across the world struggling to grow crops and protect their land with sustainable farming?
These efforts to Identify the issues and solutions are one thing. The question is whether concrete action that would end forever the inequalities that lead to malnutrition and starvation is quite another will then follow.
A look back over 2010 and whether there has been any progress in arriving at common agreement on tackling climate change, food price rises, food shortages and sustainable farming with low-chem agricultural products from biopesticides developers from Ali Withers.
Article from articlesbase.com
what are some complications with a green wedding?
I am having to write a research paper on a green wedding. I have all the positive aspects of going green but now I need a couple negatives. I have one being timing could go wrong, weather, your choices may be limited…please help with any other possibilities!! Thank you!
Read MoreWhy are you against Green or environmentalist thinking?
I am just trying to understand why some people are so vehemently opposed to doing and using "green" things that help the environment.
I just don’t understand why… it saves money, it saves the environment and it helps to reduce pollution. Regardless of weather or not you "believe" in global warming (as if it is a religion) do people still not see all of the positive benefits of using green products and building green LEED certified homes and buildings?
I’m really confused and would like real answers from real people who are against environmentalism.
thanks
Reganomics Hooked on Logic’s Profile, I know what you mean about the political aspect of it all. The funny thing is I guess I would consider myself a conservative, maybe even a republican although I have major issues with the neo-conservative republican "thought process" (or lack there of). The people I meet who are so against the "green libral stuff" are all neo-cons, but isn’t saving the environment and becomming less dependant on foriegn oil… conserving?
I just dont get it.
Chuck,
I dissagree, I dont see whats wrong with making "green" solutions profitable. It creates more job and eventually that will drive the prices down due to competitivenes.
Peppersh,
green things are not going to cause more people to starve. Its just a market shift, a solar panel plant will provide jobs just like a coal mine, they are just different. The fact remains, we are a capitalistic society and this new movement will create alot of new jobs, hell its already doing so.
What we need to look out for is stupidity… For instance, corn ethanol as someone pointed out earlier, takes way more energy to produce than just burning gass, so it is just plain stupid to look at it as an alternative energy source. The wood and gas fireplaces, although I havent heard about that, is again not a good move, but then again having a fireplace is not too smart either. Fireplaces do not warm a home, they actually draw air out of the house making your heating system have to work harder.
Why should I give any credit to the scientific community when they have been wrong on climate predictions?
In the 1970s, the big deal was global cooling.
In the 1980s, it was acid rain.
In the 1990s, it was global warming.
Now it is climate change.
Not only that, but we cannot predict weather for more than 7 days out.
Why should I give any credence to the scientists who say in 30 years the world will fall apart?
Read MoreWhat do the proponents of global warming consider normal weather patterns?
Every time any kind of weather happens, the media talks about global warming.
If there is a Hurricane, it’s global warming.
or a Snow storm, it’s global warming.
or a Tornado, it’s global warming.
or a Tsunami, it’s global warming.
So what is considered normal weather?
There have been snow storms and droughts of great and minor intensity recorded back thousands of years.
Were these caused by global warming also?