we're hearing more and more every day in the press and social media and on the telly about
the terrible damage we humans are inflicting on our climate from the burning of fossil fuels
to power our modern-day lifestyles most people nowadays get the general idea that those fossil
fuels that derived from organic matter that's been compacted down over millions and millions
of years to form rich seams of coal oil and gas and that the burning of those fossil fuels causes
the carbon in them to be rapidly released into our atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide
methane and other greenhouse gases that's been the headline hasn't it it's kind of like
the poster child for global warming and climate change but there's another aspect of our modern
human civilization that up until fairly recently didn't get anything like as much coverage but that
arguably is just as impactful on our rapidly accelerating climate crisis and that's the way
we use and abuse our land and soil on the 8th of August 2019 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change or IPCC released this new report called climate change in land with a subtitle an IPCC
special report on climate change desertification land degradation sustainable land management food
security and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems so what's this all about then
hello and welcome to just have a thnk the IPCC gets a pretty hard time from just about every
angle these days there's lots of people who think that these reports are far too watered down by
politicians and international lawyers and that the message these things deliver is so diluted
and unambitious that it drives complacency in the general public and there are of course those on
the other side of the climate argument you claim the whole thing is a hoax and that the IPCC are
nothing more than political puppets and government shills whichever way you look at it these reports
are produced as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change overseen
by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization ultimately
though every single IPCC report has to be signed off by just about every single government on the
planet so it does seem a little bit imprudent to ignore them altogether so this week we're going
to just take a very brief look at the main points raised by the IPCC in this report and we're going
to take a look at some of the counter commentary that it's provoked as a result the way we humans
use our planet's resources directly affects more than 70% of the ice-free parts of the Earth's land
area and here's how the IPCC report tells us that our land use is broken down only one percent of it
is covered in infrastructure that's our roads and towns and cities about 12% is land that we use to
grow crops a little bit of which is irrigated but most of which is not and then there's around 37%
of pasture savannas and shrublands with a whopping 19% of all available land on earth used for
extensive pasture the remainder of this 70% thing humans use is for plantations and managed forests
that are specifically designed to produce timber for construction furniture and all the other stuff
we make out of wood and that leaves about 30% made up of wild on forested ecosystems as well
as forests not touched by humans and quite a bit of barren land and rock the IPCC tell us that the
surface temperature over land has risen more than twice as much as the global average temperature
since pre-industrial times and this change in our client that's brought the increasing frequency of
extreme weather events is now starting to impact on food security and natural ecosystems quite hard
and it's also contributing to desertification and land degradation in many regions around the
globe according to the report about 23 percent of all human induced greenhouse gas emissions come
from agriculture forestry and other land use this chart shows very clearly how we force crop yields
upwards in a relatively short term not just by massively increasing the amount of land we use for
growing food largely by burning or cutting down forestry-land but also by flooding that land with
inorganic nitrogen fertilizer and it's not just the sheer number of people on the planet today
which by the way is about seven point six billion compared to 3.6 billion when I was born back in
1969 but we're all troughing far more calories each than we used to so what we've got going
on here is what you might call a bit of a double whammy take a look at this chart from the report
population increased by nearly a hundred and fifty percent since 1961 total calories consumed
per person on average up by about 40 percent the number of people classed as underweight
has gone down by nearly 50 percent and the number of overweight and obese people has almost doubled
you probably don't need me to point out that these statistics do not bode well for the future
prosperity of our species and then there's a chart on desertification and land degradation this line
shows how inland wetland areas have decreased since 1961 down by about 30 percent with all
the loss of habitat and crucial ecosystems that go along with them dryland areas in drought annually
have gone up and down quite erratically but the long-term trend is firmly upwards by almost 50
percent and that's really brought into sharp focus when you overlay the trendline for population in
areas experiencing desertification up by a massive 200 percent since 1961 the IPCC have used these
colorful bar charts in their previous report to illustrate the growing risks in various areas as
average global temperatures continue to rise in this report they focus on the effects that
rising temperatures will have specifically on our land white denotes an undetectable change
yellow is moderate red is high-risk and purple is very high-risk and this time around they overlay
some little commentary boxes to make sure we really get the message so for example if our
atmosphere temperature increases by just another degree or so there'll be a 50% increase in the
area burned in the Mediterranean another degree on top of that will bring sustained food supply
disruptions all over the planet the IPCC use what they call shared socio-economic pathways
or SSPs to compare various future scenarios and we looked at these back in October when the IPCC
released their SR 15 report it's a quick resume of what we learned then there are five SSP's SSP
1 is a sustainable development pathway which is kind of their best-case scenario SSP2 is called
middle-of-the-road development which is kind of a middle-of-the-road pathway SSP3 is called
regional rivalry where potential conflicts are factored in SSP4 deals with inequality and SSP5
is called fossil fuel development pathway which as you can imagine is the worst case scenario
and they've used three of these SSP's in this new report too here's their commentary on the possible
scenarios firstly a sustainability focused chart which tells us sustainability and land management
agricultural intensification production and consumption patterns result in reduced need for
agricultural land despite increases in per capita food consumption this land can instead be used for
reforestation a forestation and bioenergy then they show is this middle-of-the-road chart with
the commentary societal as well as technological development follows historical patterns increased
demand for land mitigation options such as bioenergy reduced deforestation or a forestation
decreases availability of agricultural land for food feed and fiber and then finally there is
intensive chart which tells us resource intensive production and consumption patterns results in
high baseline emissions mitigation focuses on technological solutions including substantial
bioenergy and BECCS which is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage intensification and competing
land-use contribute to declines in agricultural land now you can't fail to notice that in all
three of these scenarios BECCS or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is a major feature
there's a huge reliance on BECCS in all of the IPCC climate prediction scenarios it's basically
the main mechanism they use to make sure their models can reach the target of keeping average
global surface temperatures to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels but
the strategy is pretty controversial and many environmental groups are dead against it here's
a little bit of what the Friends of the Earth have said about the latest IPCC report energy
companies are currently pursuing several bioenergy sources with a worse carbon footprint than fossil
fuels these also represents a false solution and accelerate instead of mitigating climate change
burning whole trees for electricity and coal installations is damaging to forests extremely
inefficient and makes no environmental sense and burning crop based biofuels for energy contributes
to significant greenhouse gas emissions due to the destruction of natural carbon sinks as a result of
agricultural expansion it also fuels conflicts over land use carbon capture and storage isn't
a viable alternative either say Friends of the Earth CCS is a 20th century concept designed for
cheap and plentiful fossil fuels they tell us and because extra energy is needed to capture
transport and store CO2 CCS increases reliance on fossil fuels they go on to say it's a hot topic
for big energy companies because it represents for them hope that they can keep alive the current
energy model bio energy with carbon capture and storage or BECCS combines large-scale bioenergy
and CCS so even if it works at scale which is unproven to actually bring about substantial
negative emissions it require a large of all the worlds cropland and then there's the climate
campaigner and Guardian columnist George Monbiot he thinks this IPCC report has been a huge wasted
opportunity calling it pathetic in the article he wrote on the same day as its publication among his
observations and criticisms Monbiot makes this point research published in April by the Harvard
academics Helen Harwood and Matthew Hayek also missed by the IPCC shows that alongside millions
of hectares of pasture land an astonishing 55 percent of UK cropping land thats land that's
plowed and seeded is used to grow feed for livestock rather than food for humans if our
grazing land was allowed to revert to natural ecosystems and the land currently used to grow
feed for livestock was used for grains beans fruit nuts and vegetables for humans this switch would
allow the UK to absorb an astonishing quantity of carbon it would be equivalent altogether the paper
estimates to absorbing nine years of our total current emissions and farming in this country
could then feed everyone without the need for imports this is of course a view that promotes
the move away from human consumption of animal protein and rapidly towards a plant-based diet
and as someone who has felt the benefit of a plant-based diet for nearly two years now
I have to admit it's a point of view that I've got some sympathy with in fairness to
the IPCC the report does endorse the practice of sustainable land management promoting the
stewardship and use of land resources including soils water animals and plants to meet changing
human needs while simultaneously ensuring the long term productive potential of these resources and
the maintenance of their environmental functions the report references things like agroforestry
conservation agriculture and forestry practices as well as crop and forest species diversity crop
and forest rotations organic farming integrated pest management the conservation of pollinators
rainwater harvesting range and pasture management and precision agriculture systems these are all
extremely important initiatives that our wider society has generally ignored in favor of a the
understandable focus on the rapid transition away from fossil fuels and towards more sustainable
forms of energy to power our modern lifestyles alongside conservation agriculture there's also
a practice known as regenerative agriculture which focuses on topsoil regeneration increasing
biodiversity improving the water cycle enhancing ecosystem services supporting bio sequestration
increasing resilience to climate change and strengthening the health and vitality of farm
soil and this strategy places greater emphasis on the role at ruminant animals like cattle can play
in the overall cycle something that people like George Monbiot thoroughly disagree with his view
on the human integration of livestock into our natural ecosystems is very clear here's
his commentary some people try to argue that extensive farming systems particularly grazing
livestock mimic nature while some livestock farms are much better than others there are none in this
country that look like natural ecosystems Nature has no fences it has large predators wolves lynx
and other species that have been eliminated here on behalf of livestock farming and a wide range
of wild herbivores there's quite clearly a range of opinions here from different groups of people
all of whom completely understand and agree with the consensus scientific view that anthropogenic
greenhouse gas emissions are driving up the temperature of our planet's atmosphere but who
don't necessarily agree on the best strategy we need to employ to navigate our way through
the choppy waters that lie ahead so to try and understand how the science stacks up in each
case and why some of these climate campaigners are seemingly at odds with each other and often odds
with the IPCC as well we're going to be taking a much closer look at all of the competing land
management concepts and strategies in future programs over the coming weeks that's it for
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