Nature Climate Change
Climate Smart Agriculture
From a holistic perspective, our current agricultural system causes up to 57% of greenhouse gasses: chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fossil fuels, manure, forest deforestation, transport routes, food processing, packaging production, refrigeration, sales, and waste processing. The industrial agriculture causes not only the greenhouse gasses but has detrimental effects on the quality of life of animals and humans.
Many experts argue that because people are still suffering from hunger, the growth of the population continues, the adverse impact of the climate change, that the only solution is “Climate Smart Agriculture.” La Via Campesina (a global farmers’ organization) and many other social movements criticize these “smart” developments and explicitly reject the agrarian system based on this concept. It’s committed to protecting small farmers all over the world and in the development of a rural and agrarian ecological agriculture: an important contribution to climate change. They disprove the claim that industrial agriculture using fertilizer and gen-manipulated seed is more sustainable and smart. Instead, farmers using sustainable agricultural methods require less energy and promote the quality of life of humans and animals.
It is appalling that organizations like La Via Campesina see profit as devilish when rivaling two possibilities to produce food: in a healthy and social way or faster and more profitable, – what’s wrong with faster and more profitable? They do right when they demand that the power of multinational agrarian business- and large supermarkets groups must be limited by order-liberalism supremacy so that local production structures and markets are not destroyed.
Roland Leithenmayr, VFV 15. February 2017
Cheating with Emission Rights
Carbon Markets are efficient processes for cost-effective climate mitigation. They allow the private sector to earn tradable Emission Reduction Credits from projects. But it depends on the ethics of the actors whether this program can work: the mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol is subject to controversial debate and extensive research.
The journal “Nature Climate Exchange” reports that companies in Russia and Ukraine use the Kyoto Protocol to gain enormous profits. (http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2772.html). The practice of these companies are simple: their plants operate deliberately inefficiently to generate massive amounts of (toxic) gas emissions. Then they apply the Kyoto Protocol for their selfish benefit reducing the own emissions produced dishonestly receiving in exchange certificates which they sell on the carbon markets with a profit. That’s cheating! The environmentalists are trusting that this blemish has an impact on the upcoming Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of this year 2015, and finally stricter rules shall be adopted. (Source: Doris Vettermann, Betrug mit dem Klimaschutz, Kronenzeitung, Politik, Seite 4, Mittwoch 26. August 2015).
Roland Leithenmayr VfV
NGO Committee on Sustainable Development Vienna 