Today, at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, the government of California announced the launch of a Global Soil Health Challenge in partnership with France.

The challenge calls on governments across the world – both national and sub-national – to include programs that restore soil health under their national plans to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement.

Currently, only 8 governments include programs on soil health in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Yet boosting soil carbon is relatively easy, through low-tech sustainable agricultural practices. These measures not only help fight climate change, but increase biodiversity and food security too.

California has invested over $700 million to date in climate solutions for agriculture, which include the on-farm strategies for soil carbon sequestration. The state has specifically committed $22.5 million in climate investments for soil health ­– the first climate commitment for soils in the US. The funds come from the state’s cap-and-trade carbon pricing program and voter-approved bond money.

The announcement follows the launch of a new digital hub from the 4 per 1000 Initiative, backed by the governments of France, Germany and Spain. If carbon was increased in soils by just 0.4% per year, the reduction in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would correspond to all annual man-made greenhouse gas emissions – hence the name of the 4 per 1000 Initiative.

The platform will enable international collaboration between scientists, farmers and financiers on an ongoing basis in efforts to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by capturing more carbon in the planet’s soils.

Stephane Travert, France’s Minister for Agriculture and Food, said: “To be efficient and to lead to a true transition towards more sustainable agriculture, many actors have to be mobilised alongside the farmers. The 4 per 1000 Initiative will thus contribute to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. It will allow farmers to live well from their work, and contribute to food security.”

Karen Ross, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture said: “Improving soil health is a powerful climate solution. By removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in our soils, we nourish the soil for healthy food production and increase water holding capacity to be drought tolerant and ensure food security. That’s the same whether you’re in California, France or any country in the world.  As signatories to the Global Soil Health Challenge, we commit to apply these approaches and encourage other governments to join us in a soil health revolution to fight climate change.”

About the 4 per 1000 Initiative
The 4 per 1000 Initiative aims to encourage stakeholders to transition towards a productive, highly resilient agriculture, based on the appropriate management of agricultural soils in food security and climate action. Supported by solid science, the initiative invites all partners to implement practical actions on soil carbon storage. The initiative’s Secretariat is hosted by the CGIAR System Organization, an international organization based in Montpellier.

About the Global Soil Health Challenge
Announced by California and France at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, the Global Soil Health Challenge calls on national and sub-national governments to include ambitious programs of action on soil health in their Nationally Determined Contributions submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2020 and in sub-national climate initiatives as part of broader climate action plans. The signatories agree to promote the development of healthy soils within their respected geographies and report back on their progress at the 2019 UN Climate Summit in New York. The Global Soil Health Challenge is part of a suite of climate smart agriculture practices aimed to strengthen efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sequester carbon on natural and working lands, including agriculture.

 

One of the Climate Smart Agriculture programs operated by CDFA and up for discussion at this week’s Global Climate Action Summit is the State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP). This program is one of several at CDFA supported by California Climate Investments, a statewide program that puts billions of cap-and-trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment – particularly in disadvantaged communities.

 

 

With Scaling-up Climate Smart Agriculture and Global Climate Action Summit events taking place this week in Northern California, CDFA offers this encore presentation from its award-winning Growing California video series. “Cow Power” is the story of an anaerobic digester in use at New Hope Dairy in Sacramento County. This renewable energy approach is one of the focal points of CDFA’s Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation and its Dairy Digester Research and Development Program.

On September 11-12^th CDFA will bring together state and local government leaders, businesses, and citizens from around the world to share innovative and transformative achievements related to climate health and food production.

The Scaling-Up Climate Smart Agriculture event connects farmers and ranchers; multinational corporations; foreign governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to further the role that food and agriculture have in climate discussions. The event will combine panel discussions and tours related to soil health and climate smart agricultural practices and the role of sustainable procurement, technical assistance, and policy to help farmers rapidly scale up practices. California’s uniqueness as a specialty crop producer makes these discussions all the more important.

Day One (Sept 11)– will focus on farming practices, land conservation, sustainable sourcing and public policy. Notable international and national speakers include Jimmy Emmons; Emmons Farms; Zwide Jere, Total LandCare (Malawi); John Piotti, American Farmland Trust; Keith Kenny, McDonalds; Jerry Lynch, General Mills; Tina May, Land O’Lakes; Tom Rosser; Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and Paul Luu, 4 per 1,000. These speakers will be joined by a host of California’s voices including: Diana Dooley, Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr.; Jocelyn Bridson; Rio Farms; Soren Bjorn, Driscoll’s; Glenda Humiston, University of California; Katie Jackson, Jackson Family Wines, Richard Rominger, former CDFA Secretary and many others. Notable guests include Senator Bill Dodd.

A ‘California Conversation’ Tuesday evening will bring together Ann Veneman, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and past Executive Director of UNICEF; A.G. Kawamura, former CDFA Secretary; Kat Taylor, founding director of TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation; Don Cameron, president of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture and CDFA Secretary Karen Ross. Other notable guests include Assemblymember Marc Levin; Caroline Beteta, Visit California; and David Festa, Environmental Defense Fund.

Day Two (Sept 12)– brings the attendees to the farm, with tours of climate smart agricultural practices at work.  Bordessa Dairy and Stemple Creek Ranch will be profiled operations where carbon farm plans, sustainability metrics and management practices will be discussed. Speakers include: Jarrid Bordessa, Organic Valley; Loren Poncia; Stemple Creek Ranch; Wayne Honeycutt, Soil Health Institute; Nick Goeser, National Corn Growers Association; Gabriele Ludwig, Almond Board of California; and Adam Kotin, Wine Institute. Notable guests include Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore.

A complete schedule of events is available here.

 

Just days before the world comes to San Francisco to collaborate on ways to protect the environment, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. has signed an executive order to safeguard California’s unique plants, animals and ecosystems which are threatened by climate change.

“The new reality of climate change requires a more thoughtful and systemic approach that considers the connections and the vast web of relationships that tie together the myriad elements of California’s ecosystems,” Governor Brown wrote in the order.

California is home to more species of plants and animals than any other state in the country.

The deserts, forests, mountain ranges, valleys, wetlands, woodlands, rivers, estuaries, marine environments, rangelands and agricultural fields of California provide refuge for a vast array of species including approximately 650 species of birds, 220 mammals, 75 amphibians, 70 freshwater fish, over 100 marine fish and mammals and approximately 6,500 native plants – of which 2,000 or more are rare.

Together, the state’s plants and animals co-exist to create the complex ecosystems upon which so much of California’s people and economy depend.

This executive order directs the Department of Food and Agriculture and the Department of Fish and Wildlife to work together to safeguard existing plants and animals while restoring and protecting habitat across both working and wild places.

The order also establishes September 7 as California Biodiversity Day each year.

This action follows steps taken earlier this year to protect the state’s biological heritage. The enacted 2018-19 state budget allocated $2.5 million to launch the California Biodiversity Initiative in partnership with tribal groups, educators and researchers, the private sector, philanthropic groups and landowners. In May, Governor Brown also recognized International Day for Biological Diversity.

The steps outlined in the executive order and complimentary California Biodiversity Initiative will improve understanding of the state’s biological richness and identify actions to preserve, manage and restore ecosystems to protect the state’s biodiversity from climate change.

The text of the executive order can be found here.

Note – CDFA is participating in the Biodiversity Intiative through its Healthy Soils Program Action Plan and Ag Vision, in addition to providing leadership and collaboration on critical issues like plant and animal protection, climate change, and the maintenance and development of natural and working lands.   

Note – CDFA and its secretary, Karen Ross, will be participants at next week’s Global Climate Action Summit, where a number of key sustainability issues across multiple sectors will be addressed. Part of the agency’s involvement is hosting partner events in connection with the Summit. CDFA is committed to helping farmers and ranchers adapt to climate change through a series of programs offered through its Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation (OEFI).

By Jason Clay, Executive Director, the Markets Institute at the World Wildlife Fund

In two years, nearly every government on Earth will convene under the auspices of the United Nations 26th Conference of Parties to consider two big questions: How well have we done against the climate change targets we set in Paris in 2015? And how much more must we do to minimize the effects of climate change?

It’s difficult to answer those questions today, but it should be a bit easier next week after governors, mayors, CEOs, scientists and many more gather in San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit. There, all the constituencies that are not a party to the UN process—that is, those that don’t represent a national government—will take stock of their own actions to reduce carbon emissions and set new, more ambitious goals. The summit is organized around several themes, including land use and food production, in particular.

Land Use Drives Climate Change

There’s a direct connection between land use and climate change. When they’re healthy, forests, grasslands, and other landscapes pull carbon out of the air and sequester it in vegetation and soil. When habitats are cleared—most often to make way for agriculture, especially beef, soy and palm oil—they release the carbon they’ve stored back into the atmosphere. As the planet’s capacity to reabsorb carbon shrinks due to the loss of perennial habitats, emissions become even more concentrated.

That’s why 2020 is such an important year. By then, members of the Consumer Goods Forum resolved to achieve zero-net deforestation for the main drivers of deforestation—cattle, soy, palm oil, and paper and pulp. Signatories to the New York Declaration on Forests also declared in 2014 that they will eliminate deforestation from the same commodity supply chains and halve overall deforestation by 2020.

Reducing Agriculture’s Impact

Agriculture must survive and thrive because we need food. But, we must reduce its impacts. Fortunately, we can, by producing more with less land and decreasing habitat conversion and other inputs in general. And we can begin by changing the way we produce livestock and feed.

Historically, animal protein production has become far more efficient, driven by improved genetics of both animals and feed crops, improved diet and feeding systems, and better management practices and veterinary care, among other factors. Across the board, livestock producers have gotten more protein from fewer resources. Animals grow more quickly, produce more milk and eggs, use less feed and water, occupy less land, and emit fewer greenhouse gases.

Of course, this has been a product of intensification, which comes with its own environmental impacts, such as greater concentration of waste with more significant impacts on water quality. Producers were driven to improve the quality of their products and to make more money by improving their overall efficiency, not to reduce environmental impacts per se. No one was monitoring the industry’s impacts and making sector-wide commitments to reduce them. Knowledge sharing happened at the local diner or feed store.

If You Can’t Measure, You Can’t Improve

With better metrics and monitoring, more open knowledge sharing, and greater financial incentives, producers can do even more to reduce the environmental impacts of livestock production. But today, producers lack a uniform set of metrics for key impacts or defined baselines. Without them, it is impossible to drive—much less document—improvements, prioritize interventions, set hard targets, and assess overall effectiveness.

As a consequence, downstream players such as retailers and brands that want to encourage their suppliers to improve don’t know what to prioritize or where or how to hold suppliers accountable. Social media is driving change more than science and data. Going forward, we need to be more strategic and focus our limited resources on reducing the impacts that are most significant. And this is just with animal protein.

Imagine if we want to improve all proteins.

Which Proteins Have the Least Impact?

Apples-to-apples comparisons of impacts across all proteins, from lamb to lentils, are even more difficult. But without them, we can’t make comparisons between proteins or reduce key impacts across species and geographies. And, without focusing on a key set of impacts, how can producers learn from each other about what works best to make production more sustainable? Standardizing metrics globally could do for sustainability what it did for food health and safety and global food trade.

Performance and impact data should be shared within and across industries. With the stakes so high, supply chain partners and even competitors should weigh the trade value of the data against the mutual benefits of sustaining resource production and stabilizing the climate. Sharing data, working together and being more transparent about common goals and results can mitigate the reputational risks that one bad actor can create for an entire industry.

Tracking Salmon

The Global Salmon Initiative provides a good model: In 2013, CEOs of 17 of the world’s largest salmon farming companies (representing 70 percent of global production) recognized that they could improve environmental performance by working together and sharing information. Their 2020 goal is that 100 percent of their salmon will be certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, which WWF helped establish. And, unlike most 2020 commitments, the group is 50 percent of the way there and has pulled most of the global salmon industry along with them.

Finally, we need more innovative financial mechanisms and partnerships to facilitate investment, including long-term contracts and performance-linked interest rates, among others. Using these, entities such as banks, governments, and buyers can work together to give producers either the capital or the appropriate timeline they need to invest in better production.

Finding Creative Financing for Creative Solutions

With access to markets and financial support, producers can afford to invest in new technologies and practices that can shrink the most significant portions of protein’s (e.g., animals and feed) environmental footprint. These include turning manure into energy, growing feed with fewer carbon emissions, reducing reliance on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, and eliminating the conversion of natural habitats from the Great Plains to the Amazon.

At the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco from September 12-14, many companies will talk about what they are doing to conserve habitats and fight climate change through their supply chains. But, companies can only do so much—without consensus about the key impacts and metrics as well as the obstacles to improving performance, producers will not be able to build on their success to date. And, there is still a lot of progress left to make.

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At CDFA’s Plant Pest Diagnostics lab in South Sacramento, scientists work long hours identifying invasive species–pests and diseases–that threaten California’s environment and food supply. Examples of these would be exotic fruit flies as well as the Asian citrus psyllid and the disease it carries, huanglongbing, or citrus greening. This video produced by the California Association of Professional Scientists examines some of that work and takes us in some interesting and unexpected directions.