A brief note on an important initiative: the discussion around agriculture and climate change often highlights the resilience issue. The concern is with ensuring that we are able to grow enough food for all the people on the planet as growing conditions change, often in sudden and unexpected ways. Less often is there a discussion on tackling the contribution of agriculture to the process of climate change by reducing emissions from agriculture. So the announcement of a set of steps intended to bring about just such changes by the USDA. The measures include promoting no till, renewable energy, forest conservation,energy efficiency in farming, containing methane emissions from livestock etc and are voluntary; thought the government proposes to incentivize the measures in several ways. It is estimated that this policy would reduce agricultural emissions by about 120 million metric tons, a 20% reduction from the present level.
(Image Courtesy: kangshutters from FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
Thought + Food 