Agriculture & Climate Change

The way we produce food in the current world accounts for half of all human created greenhouse gas emissions. Waste, transportation, deforestation, food processing, packaging, refrigeration and freezing add up to making agriculture one of the main polluters in the world.

The world’s top 20 meat and dairy companies emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than all of Germany, according to a report published by GRAIN, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) and Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Policy makers, scientists, companies and decision makers are all aware of these figures, so the question remains: why has agriculture been part of the conversations on climate change conferences only in the past few years? Why are geoengineering solutions being proposed to solve climate change when we know the solution is right under our feet and shovel ready?

In this talk we look at some of the trends in the UN global climate change conversations, and discuss the solutions that those who created the problem in the first place want to bring to the table: climate smart agriculture, geoengineering and smoking mirrors.

But since there is hope and we know that agriculture done right is part of the solution, we will discuss the way we can change the conversation from degenerative to regenerative, winning over hearts, minds and soil. To do so, we will analyze some promising initiatives such as the 4 per 1000 French initiative: “Soils for Food Security and Climate,” a global plan and agreement to reverse global warming, soil degradation, deteriorating public health and rural poverty by scaling up regenerative food, farming and land use practices.