Editor’s Pick: Mitigation Low-Emissions Agriculture Blogs
Editor’s Pick: Mitigation Low-Emissions Agriculture Blogs
jschoshinski
Tue, 04/09/2024 – 14:00
Increased extreme weather events and shifts in seasonal patterns, including temperature and precipitation, are having a significant negative impact on agriculture production, livelihoods, and food security. USAID is developing and scaling climate-smart agriculture practices that both respond to the threats posed by climate impacts and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the sector. The following blogs reflect the March and April theme of Mitigation and Low-Emissions Agriculture, as well as highlight some of the ways USAID is working at the intersection of climate and agriculture and food systems.
Advancing Low-Emissions Agriculture and Food Systems: How USAID is Championing Food Security and Climate Action
At COP28, the United States signed the Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action declaration, which is a global recognition that climate and food security goals go hand-in-hand. USAID’s 2022-2030 Climate Strategy also recognized this intersection, explicitly calling for food systems transformation that contributes to climate change mitigation. Currently, USAID’s approach to Low-Emissions Agriculture and Food Systems focuses on targeted emissions reductions, as well as support of adaptation efforts with mitigation co-benefits through multiple funding streams, including agriculture, climate, biodiversity, water, and governance.
Integrated Rice-Fish Farming in Nigeria: A Resilient Approach in the Face of Climate Change
Severe weather events such as flooding, drought, and rising temperatures are endangering the livelihoods of fishing and farming communities in Nigeria. To address this, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish introduced farmers to a new method of growing rice and fish in the same aquatic ecosystem. This approach reduces greenhouse gas emissions and builds food supply, boosting nutrition in the community.
More Milk with Fewer Cows: The Potential for Methane Reduction in Kenya’s Dairy Sector
The agriculture and livestock sector is critically important to food security, nutrition, and economic growth in many low- and middle-income countries, including Kenya. The impact of this sector on climate change, particularly through methane emissions, is a concern, but USAID is championing potential win-win agricultural interventions that can meet both climate and food security goals. In Kenya, the Feed the Future Kenya Crops and Dairy Activity works with farmers to improve their milk yield and productivity in a way that generates positive benefits for the environment.
Conservation Agriculture a Saving Grace for the Kavango Region
Rural communities in the Namibian catchment areas of the Okavango River Basin rely on rain-fed farming, so poor rainfall caused by climate change is exacerbating food insecurity. USAID’s Resilient Waters Program spearheaded a climate adaptation initiative by equipping farmers with innovative climate-smart skills to minimize the likelihood of negative outcomes from climate shocks. In just two months, Resilient Waters trained 552 farmers on Conservation Agriculture, a modern sustainable agriculture production technique.
Cultivating Sustainable Solutions for Peru’s Cacao Farmers
The USAID-supported Peruvian Extension and Research Utilization Hub (PERU-Hub) helps farmers in Peru combat climate challenges and prevent losses that could hurt their livelihoods and weaken Peru’s economy. The Hub explores the application of advanced technologies to climate resilience, crop diversification, and food production with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 200 tons CO2e by 2026.
Teaser Text
The following blogs highlight some of the ways USAID is working at the intersection of climate and agriculture and food systems.
Publish Date
Tue, 04/09/2024 – 12:00
Author(s)
Jamie Schoshinski
Hero Image
Salihu’s explains bumper yield in his biofertilized rice farm.jpg
Blog Type
Blog Post
Strategic Objective
Adaptation
Mitigation
Integration
Region
Global
Topic
Agriculture
Climate-Resilient Agriculture
Biodiversity Conservation
Emissions
Climate Strategy
Food Security
Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities
Methane
Mitigation
Nutrition
Resilience
Weather
Country
Kenya
Namibia
Nigeria
Peru
Sectors
Agriculture and Food Systems
Dirty dancing across a new energy landscape
One of my favourite movies as a kid was Dirty Dancing; I was energised by the music and dance. Now, when it comes to discussing our evolving energy systems and the need to transition to a net zero future, the dancing metaphor is a great fit. Here’s why.
The real-time balancing of electricity generation (supply) and demand is like a dynamic dance and if the two dancers are not in sync, the electricity system could tumble.
Demand has long been the leader, increasing when you flick on your kettle, and its dance partner, generation, follows its lead and increases too.
But the electricity system is transforming. Demand has suddenly flipped into an energetic tango, leaving the flowing waltz of the past behind.
Similarly, generation (supply) is no longer the perpetual follower of demand: grid-scale renewable generation output is growing rapidly. However, electricity generation from renewables is plentiful at times and sometimes it’s not dancing at all — when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow — making balancing the electricity grid challenging.
Meanwhile, homes and businesses have become power generators in their own right, with rooftop solar, batteries and energy storage systems becoming more prevalent.
Keeping supply and demand moving in sync requires orchestration and incentives, as we transition to renewables and reduce emissions. Together, orchestration and incentives must overcome inconsistent generation and transmission challenges, and ensure increasing volumes of storage.
With storage, we have a new dance partner joining demand to spin around the dancefloor: when generation is resting, storage cuts in.
Importantly, we also need to teach demand to follow its generation partner’s lead every now and again. In the energy industry, we call this demand management, and this is the unsung hero and future of the grid.
To make demand management work, we need price signals to motivate changes to energy use by telling the market the true value or cost of each electron. In my Dirty Dancing analogy, this is like a conductor changing the beat, driving energy consumption to another time when energy is most available.
Due to supply and demand being out of step, an electron in the middle of the day can be far cheaper than an electron at 7:00 pm.
Today, many residential and small business consumers pay a flat rate regardless of supply scarcity. For larger energy consumers, pricing has been a little smarter, as most pay different rates for peak and off-peak and can therefore pay less by altering when they use energy.
High prices due to global energy supply shortages in the past couple of years have revealed the inadequacy of these old pricing regimes. When supply gets tight, the market operator must step in with expensive interventions to maintain reliability.
The future requires proactive mechanisms to better reflect scarcity and abundance. For example, it could be more cost-effective for a small manufacturer to have two production lines that run during daylight hours (powered by rooftop solar) than it is to have one production line that runs 24/7.
Most importantly, the consumer needs to be rewarded appropriately for helping to maintain grid reliability.
If you coordinate energy efficiency, demand response and demand management properly, you can realise significant value in that flexibility.
Today’s major energy consumers have multiple energy assets at their disposal — onsite generation, possibly onsite storage, and maybe untapped ability for demand management. As well as a retail electricity supply contract, they may also have renewable electricity contracts.
In recent years we’ve identified material savings for Schneider Electric’s industrial customers by finding the opportunities in all that complexity. It’s no easy task, but once done, consumers can plainly see the value of energy efficiency, demand management and demand response.
Load flexibility is a major asset to the grid of the future. As we upgrade our buildings, production facilities and homes, and add onsite solar or batteries, EV charging and smart technology, we need to think about improving our ability to flex our loads and encouraging changing consumption patterns.
Improving capability for flexing load also improves grid resilience. Of course, energy and decarbonisation are intrinsically linked, as the energy system is responsible for some 75% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Consumers big and small should think holistically about all the energy efficiency, electrification and energy management actions that are part of a wider aim to decarbonise.
We need to teach the steps through price signals, understanding value, understanding and improving demand management capability, and holistic thinking.
If demand is better managed, we can decarbonise and improve our grid much faster so that demand and generation can seamlessly dance in time across a decarbonised grid.
My hope is to see our grid be the first to achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy. It’s like the big lift in Dirty Dancing, a display of partners taking flight and moving in unison.
Lisa Zembrodt is the Principal and Senior Director of Sustainability Business for the Pacific Zone at Schneider Electric.
Top image credit: iStock.com/suteishi
Kyle Johnson: Sawmills are closing. How does that effect us?
Editors note: Kyle Johnson is a forester with the Bureau of Land Management’s Missoula Field Office. Mr. Johnson is not affiliated with Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities but gave us permission to share his message. It seems like the topic everyone
Suffocating Subjects Long for Air in Nick Brandt’s Unsettling Underwater Photos
Although warming global temperatures are causing sea levels to rise around the globe, the Pacific islands are experiencing the change at a more rapid rate than anywhere else. Higher tides and extreme weather can wage unrelating flooding, rendering low-lying regions uninhabitable and displacing the communities that call them home.
In Sink / Rise, Nick Brandt peers into the not-so-distant future to imagine the effects of rising waters. His photographs depict people performing unremarkable tasks like sitting at a table or tottering on a seesaw, although their surroundings are incredibly unsettling. More
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Suffocating Subjects Long for Air in Nick Brandt’s Unsettling Underwater Photos appeared first on Colossal.