\u201cSoil is a completely underestimated issue when we talk about climate change,\u201d said Andrea Kohl, Programme Director at the WWF.<\/p>\n
Kohl was speaking at the last session of a two-day public consultation conference organised by the European Commission on 10-11 July.<\/p>\n
\u201cSoil is essential in the debate on how we tackle climate change,\u201d Kohl reminded the audience, underlining that \u201cthe release of just a small fraction of the soil carbon stock can offset savings achieved elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
The session at Brussels University was focused on the role of natural resources as part of Europe\u2019s strategy for long-term emissions reduction.<\/p>\n
The European Commission is working on a long-term strategy for climate change, which will contain several pathways to 2050, including one where the EU achieves carbon neutrality by mid-century.<\/p>\n
The 2050 strategy will be published in November, just before the United Nation\u2019s annual climate conference in Katowice, Poland, on 3-14 December. The European Council mandated the Commission to come up with a 2050 climate strategy during a summit of EU leaders in March.<\/p>\n
The EU\u2019s\u00a0existing 2050 low-carbon economy roadmap\u00a0was published in 2011, before the bloc signed up to the Paris Agreement, which commits its signatories to keep global warming \u201cwell below 2\u00b0C\u201d and aiming for \u201cno more than 1.5\u00b0C\u201d.<\/p>\n
During his opening addresses on Wednesday (10 July), Miguel Arias Ca\u00f1ete, the European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy, said that\u00a0the Commission has already started working on the economic, social and environmental aspects of the strategy.<\/p>\n
The issue with land use<\/p>\n
\u201cSoil can act as a carbon sink, and therefore significantly contribute to mitigating climate change, but it can also contribute to global warming because of land use,\u201d said Hartmut Stalb, from the Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI), specified.<\/p>\n
Soil provides nutrients for plant growth. It also regulates the water cycle and stores carbon, making it the second largest carbon pool after the oceans. But land use \u2013 grassland, cropland, forestry \u2013 can cause soil carbon losses, which in turn may lead to soil degradation and the loss of soil organic matter, Stalb said.<\/p>\n
The European Commission is well aware of the environmental dilemma caused by agriculture. \u201cAgriculture is a sector that can remove CO2 but it is also a sector that is very much in demand\u00a0\u2013 it is expected to feed the world,\u201d said Artur Runge-Metzger, Director at the Commission\u2019s Climate Action department.<\/p>\n
Lack of incentives<\/p>\n
But agriculture is also impacted by the rising temperature, Runge-Metzger continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of temperature, 2050 will look very different. Already European summers are getting dryer and winters are getting wetter,\u201d he remarked.<\/p>\n
Pekka Pesonen, the Secretary General of EU farmers\u2019 organisation Copa-Cogeca, observed that the weather patterns already vary enormously from year-to-year and from region to region.<\/p>\n
Jean-Francois Soussana, Vice-President of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) pointed out that two years ago, in France, the change of temperature led to a 30% drop in yields for wheat.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to go back to the 1980s to see that,\u201d the scientist said.<\/p>\n
For the farmers\u2019 representative, new technologies offer solutions for agriculture to adapt to the changing weather patterns.\u00a0\u201cEurope has to ensure that they are made available to farmers and also make sure that it leads the world on these technologies,\u201d said Pesonen.<\/p>\n
However, Jean-Francois Soussana pointed out that farmers are still reluctant to use new technologies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese technologies have the potential to reduce costs up to a third. So why are farmers not doing this? Because of risk aversion. We need to work on why farmers are overusing chemicals,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
According to Andrea Kohl, farmers would be more efficient if they reacted collectively to climate change.\u00a0\u201cWe are falling short from what we need to do. Yet, we stay in front of an unprecedented challenge with climate change. Something is coming up to us we have never seen in the past and we are not necessarily ready,\u201d she warned.<\/p>\n
But Pesonen stressed that no one will be able to force anybody to change their practices unless it makes sense economically, prompting Hartmut Stalb to observe that, for the moment at least, there is no financial incentive for farmers to change their practices. And there is no market value for sustainable production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cSoil is a completely underestimated issue when we talk about climate change,\u201d said Andrea Kohl, Programme Director at the WWF. Kohl was speaking at the last session of a two-day public consultation conference organised by the European Commission on 10-11 July. \u201cSoil is essential in the debate on how we tackle climate change,\u201d Kohl reminded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[12426,14695],"supplier":[2317,2770],"class_list":["post-54662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-climatechange","tag-soil","supplier-european-commission","supplier-world-wildlife-fund-us-wwf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54662"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=54662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}