SciDevNet: Pakistan’s outdated crop yield forecasting system needs a revamp, says Ibrar ul Hassan Akhtar. Like most developing countries, Pakistan is staring at the spectre of food insecurity, with its food production out of sync with population growth. The food availability scenario is further complicated by changing weather patterns with recurring severe droughts and floods [...]

ICIMOD: The Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region is blessed with a diversity of honeybee species; five species – Apis cerana, Apis dorsata, Apis florea, Apis laboriosa, and Apis andreniformis – are indigenous, while Apis mellifera is introduced. Of these species, only Apis cerana and Apis mellifera can be kept in hives and managed for honey [...]

ATREE: The Himalayas are assumed to be undergoing rapid climate change, with serious environmental, social and economic consequences for more than two billion people. However, data on the extent of climate change or its impact on the region are meagre. Based on local knowledge, we report perceived changes in climate and consequences of such changes [...]

FIBL: Climate change mitigation is urgent, and adaptation to climate change is crucial, particularly in agriculture, where food security is at stake. Agriculture, currently responsible for 20-30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (counting direct and indirect agricultural emissions), can however contribute to both climate change mitigation and adaptation. The main mitigation potential lies in the [...]

Guardian: Global warming threatens the future of Peru’s poorest coffee farmers, but one brand thinks it has found an answer on the financial markets. In the foothills of the Andes, in the Sierra Piura region of Peru, the problems faced by coffee farmers are clear. Up to 6,600 farmers produce here for the Central Piurana [...]

Devex: Global demand for food will double in coming decades, through population growth and rising levels of consumption. Ensuring the planet produces enough food for all in a sustainable way will be a real challenge, and climate change will hamper our efforts if it is not tackled. Food security is crucial to helping the poorest [...]

Scidevnet: The multi-billion dollar cassava industry of South–East Asia may already be suffering from multiple pest and disease outbreaks triggered by climate change, cassava researchers have told a conference in Bangkok. Although the crop can thrive in hotter and dryer conditions in the region, an increase in pests and diseases could easily wipe out recent [...]

Vancouversun: Experts seek ways to boost production; World will need 70 per cent more food by 2050 In flood-damaged fields in the Philippines, farmers are testing a hardy new variety of rice that can survive completely submerged for more than two weeks. In Kenya’s Kibera slum, poor urban families are turning around their diets and [...]

The News Pakistan: A Bangladeshi disaster management expert, Khurshid Alam, on Friday emphasised the need for training the local community in playing an effective role in recovering from natural calamities and minimising the adverse effects of an emergency. Local knowledge should be incorporated in designing a disaster management plan. It is very important to learn [...]

Dr. Sudhirendar Sharma: I’m indeed grateful to all the members who made written submissions to the discussions on ‘rewriting mountain perspective‘. At bilateral level, many others have contributed their unwritten thoughts and reflections. While many have gone public with their inputs, others have restricted themselves to drawing-room conversations such that they remain ‘unidentified’ in the [...]

CICERO: Melting glaciers below 6000 metres create problems for Himalayan farmers. It is well documented that temperatures in the Himalayas have risen in recent decades and that glaciers in the region are losing mass. According to a study by Ren et al., many of the glaciers on the south slope of the central Himalayas have [...]

Alertnet: At present, close to one billion people suffer from hunger. Experts agree that there is a high risk of climate change affecting food security at the global level, with the most negative impacts in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. The additional risk of climate change could put several hundred million at risk of [...]

RAYAGADA, India, Apr 27, 2012 (IPS) – Tribal farmer Harish Saraka has rediscovered the key to sustainable farming in this rain-dependent hinterland of eastern Odisha state – mixed cropping. Saraka, 38, is careful not to take credit for helping to turn around farming in this area, in the news just a decade ago for starvation [...]

WorldAgroforestry: Agriculture is the human enterprise that is most vulnerable to climate change. Tropical agriculture, particularly subsistence agriculture is particularly vulnerable, as smallholder farmers do not have adequate resources to adapt to climate change. While agroforestry may play a significant role in mitigating the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHG), it also has a role [...]

UN Solution Exchange: The query on ‘Flood resistant tree crops for ensuring food security’ was floated by UN Solution Exchange India to its members. The responses got are interesting one and could be replicated in the mountains as well. The UNSE members opined that though India has rich traditional knowledge and wisdom to mitigate disasters, [...]

CGIAR: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and supply agreements in the agricultural sector have a significant role to play to promote agricultural climate change mitigation and decrease pressure on the earth’s land and climate. Private sector engagement can also promote food security and positively affect the livelihoods of smallholder agricultural producers in developing countries. This states [...]

Sciencecodex: Recognizing the knowledge gap between the existing evidence of climate change and adaptation on the ground, researchers in Asia launched a novel learning platform to improve agricultural resilience to changing weather patterns, and to reduce emissions footprint. The Climate Smart Agriculture Learning Platform for South Asia, established by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate [...]

EVI: The changing dynamics of agriculture sector and the emerging threat of climate change The agriculture sector and its remarkable advances during the middle of 20th century is considered to be the basis for securing the food supply of a rapidly expanding human population especially in the developing countries that was enjoying the fruits of [...]

Yale Environment 360: Large-scale industrial agriculture depends on engineering the land to ensure the absence of natural diversity. But as the recent emergence of herbicide-tolerant weeds on U.S. farms has shown, nature ultimately finds a way to subvert uniformity and assert itself. In its short, shameless history, big agriculture has had only one big idea: [...]

Farmers Weekly: The government’s chief scientific adviser has told Farmers Weekly that farmers should be convinced that global warming is a reality. John Beddington condemned climate scientists who refuse to accept that climate change is happening as all the evidence points towards climate change in a number of forms. “I would completely disagree with those [...]

GHT: The impact of climate change could fall disproportionately on women and children, more so in the remote mountains of Nepal. Participants of the Climate Smart Celebrity Trek met with media and local authorities at a press conference in Jumla today and discussed how the changed climate impacts the livelihood of the families, which in [...]

Deccan Herald: The Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (CEFIPRA) on Monday launched a multi-disciplinary Indo-French research project titled ‘Adaptation of Irrigated Agriculture to Climate Change (AICHA).’ The study aims at developing an integrated model for analysing the impact of climate change on ground water-irrigated agriculture in south India. Berambadi village and surrounding [...]

SciDevnet: Durable food security and agricultural growth depend on development strategies with resilience built in from the start, says Gordon Conway. Economic growth with resilience to environmental threats will be central to the agenda of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June this year, which aims to map out a pathway of sustainable development [...]

After an introduction from recent literature on how climate change influences the livelihood of rural people, we discuss and illustrate what climate change really means for farmers in Asia, including global warming, increasing climate variability, more and more severe climate extremes, and contributions from agriculture in diminishing greenhouse gases. (I) I. INTRODUCTION Vulnerable communities across [...]

Times of India And Business Recorder: The productivity of staple grain wheat could decline by upto 18% by 2020 due to adverse impact of climate change which is causing rise in temperature, Parliament was informed today. The yield of another major food crop rice might also fall by up to 6 per cent by 2020, [...]

SANDRP Delhi: On World Water Day 2012, the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People (SANDRP) is happy to publish its new report: Water Sector Options for India in a Changing Climate. The report highlights that for the poorest sections, also most vulnerable in the climate change context, the water, food, livelihood and energy [...]

Nature-Jeff Tollefson: Round-table talks aim to slow climate warming by transforming agriculture. The principle is seductively simple: to reduce carbon emissions, leave tropical forests standing. But a widely heralded approach in which rich nations would pay poorer ones to keep their forests intact has proved trickier to deploy than many had hoped. Now a consortium [...]

Newswise — MADISON – An independent commission of scientific leaders from 13 countries today released a detailed set of recommendations to policymakers on how to achieve food security in the face of climate change. In their report, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change proposes specific policy responses to the global challenge of feeding [...]

BBC News- By Richard Black Environment correspondent: Major changes are needed in agriculture and food consumption around the world if future generations are to be adequately fed, a major report warns. Farming must intensify sustainably, cut waste and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farms, it says. The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change spent [...]

By Sujoy Dhar, IPSNews, KOLKATA – Sahara Bibi, a 47-year-old poor Muslim woman living on one of the climate- impacted islands of Eastern India’s fragile Sundarbans archipelago in West Bengal state, was forced to pull her two young sons out of school and send one of them to the Southern state of Kerala to earn [...]

By Subir Ghosh, DNA: It’s bad news for all – from farmers to policymakers. Yields of tea, coffee and cardamom from high altitude plantations in the Western Ghats are falling because of the changing regional climate. Worse, the region is likely to see a 1.7-1.8 degrees C rise in temperature by 2030. Rainfall may increase [...]

Low-tech experiment produces accurate data on threat to plant biodiversity and may also help with carbon capture. The fresh snow covers the Aubonne valley overlooking Lake Geneva. Clumps of beech, maple and juniper trees cling to the slopes of the Jura highlands. Scientists from Lausanne Polytechnic (EPFL) and Switzerland‘s Forest, Snow and Landscape Research Institute [...]

Livestock production systems in Nepal are experiencing a significant downturn as critical resources such as water, soil, forests, agricultural productivity and farm labor are affected by rapid land use changes and climate change impacts. To ensure livestock climate change adaptation and strengthen livestock production systems, it is critical to understand and enhance feed, nutrition, and [...]

With climate change posing one of the biggest challenges, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee Friday announced Rs.200 crore for research to develop plant and seed varieties that yield more and can resist climate change. “Food security and agricultural development in the coming decades would depend upon scientific and technological breakthroughs in raising productivity. We have to [...]

Innovative measures by women farmers across India are helping several poor families adapt better to climate change and keep hunger at bay. As Sursati from village Janakpur, district Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, explains, “Earlier, we could not produce enough food for a year because our village would get water-logged by the flood waters. Now, using [...]

In a series of articles over the last several decades, I have reported on the major first-order role of land use change as a regional and global climate forcing. A sample of the papers we have authored on this subject include: Pielke, R.A. and R. Avissar, 1990: Influence of landscape structure on  local and regional [...]

The EU has called on European governments to include data on CO2 emissions from farming and forestry in their efforts to tackle climate change. The draft law on accounting rules is in line with what was agreed at the Durban climate change conference in December. But the EU does not yet plan to include farming [...]

Case Study: Conventional agricultural practices in tropical latitudes, using modern plant breeding techniques, fertilizers, and irrigation, have resulted in an increased grain yield (Huxley, 1999). However, these agricultural practices have also played a major role in increasing the global total area of marginal land that is now substandard for the long-term production of food and [...]

Small farmers and crop production are under stress in the face of climate change. The impact of climate change is unfolding at a pace that is much quicker than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated a new research study released here in the Capital recently. The study conducted by Action Aid [...]

Placing a greater emphasis on agriculture in negotiations on climate change, as in the development of national policies, will ensure that agriculture fully contributes to efforts to adapt and mitigate without undermining food production and the fight against poverty.” Global warming will change the face of farming, and is already doing so in some parts [...]

Hydrogen fluoride emissions from brick kilns have been found to damage trees and crops in new studies conducted by an international team of scientists in the Peshawar area of northern Pakistan. Peshawar has 450 brick kilns and hydrogen fluoride is also released by factories making aluminium, ceramics, and phosphate fertilisers. Reporting their findings in the [...]

Sammad Sheikh of Tangchekh village in north Kashmir cannot understand why the rice fields that his family cultivated for generations are drying up. “It is a mystery as to why water is getting scarcer in summers,” he says. “This has been happening for the past few years though there have been one or two good [...]

Institutions play a crucial role in the ability of vulnerable systems to cope with and adjust to change and uncertainty. They can either enable or constrain access to resources, markets, regulations, information, finance, and technologies, among others, which are key to overcome the challenges and benefit from the potential opportunities posed by climate change. Thus, [...]

Mr. Cyril R Raphael: In this article Mr. Raphael writes the agony of mountains in general by taking an example of overall development in one of the Indian mountain states called Uttarakhand. His discourse covers the social and economic development, governance, leadership, availability of basic amenities, health, education, livelihood, effectiveness of information and communication, role [...]

As I kid I liked to get up early with Grandma and sit with her in the kitchen while she cooked breakfast. She’d give me coffee, southern-style — thin, sweet and creamy. It was a treat because it was so wrong. Coffee, as any medical professional could have explained at the time, stunted your growth. [...]

K N Vajpai: This article is in the series of responses to ongoing discussion on ‘Mountain Perspective’ at http://bit.ly/yYlbpl . It looks in to the aspects of mountain perspective and specificities as mentioned by Dr. N. S. Jodha during 1992s, and compares them in present  context. For the reference of readers and forum discussants, I [...]

In one of the articles published in 2009, by Koji Matsuo, Kosuke Heki from the Dept. of Natural History Sci., Hokkaido University, Japan mentioned that a substantial amount of glacial ice is melting in the Asian high mountains (AHM). It stated that the Gravimetry by GRACE satellite during 2003–2009 suggests the average ice loss rate [...]

Australia’s farmers must ”demand more from science” to help them adjust to the challenges of climate change, a leading agricultural scientist says. Addressing a rural leadership forum in Canberra this week, CSIRO chief research scientist Professor Mark Howden said there was ”a political economy in science” that often encouraged a repetitive publication of research data [...]

Developing countries can only build a green economy by adopting “profound policy reforms” to transform small-scale agriculture, argue Peter Messerli, from the Centre for Development and Environment in Switzerland, and colleagues. The green economy — one where growth comes with environmental and economic benefits — is dominating policy debates, including those linked to the UN [...]

ICAR says knowledge of climate change impact in India is ‘fragmentary’. A recent international conference on climate change and sustainable agriculture in New Delhi brought forth the shocking realisation that there are no conclusive studies in India on the prospective impact of climate change on the agriculture sector including livestock and fisheries. Much of the [...]

Climate change requires attitude change. The official call is actually for Climate-Change Adaptation and Mitigation. And since the impact of climate change would be most felt in terms of agricultural output and food production, farmers need to be equipped with adaptation and mitigation skills and techniques to ensure maximum yield despite extreme or erratic climatic [...]

The instant communications technology that nurtured grassroots revolutions in the Arab world could also help farmers cope with climate change, according to Iowa State University researchers. And so the researchers – Steven Fales, a professor of agronomy; and Gene Takle, director of Iowa State’s Climate Science Program, a professor of agronomy and of geological and [...]

AN expert from the Food and Agriculture Office (FAO) is pitching calls for the adoption of “climate-smart agriculture” to address the twin challenges of achieving food security and climate change. Hideki Kanamaru of the Climate, Energy and Tenure Division (NRC) of the FAO told participants of the APEC Symposium on Climate Change held at the [...]

A new climate change tool will not only help farmers to prepare for the future, it may also spur implementation of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Although 127 countries rushed to ratify the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, far fewer have implemented it in [...]

The traditional Chinese farming calendar, still used by millions of farmers to guide their farming activities, should be adapted to reflect global warming, say scientists. The 24 ‘solar terms’, a set of timings reflecting the seasonal cycle, were laid down 2,000 years ago as a supplement to the traditional Chinese calendar. They are marked on [...]

Scientific American: Climate change may ultimately push some species off mountainous islands in the sky. The cloud forests of the Andes mountains, bound between the Amazonian lowlands to the west and the peaks of the Andean uplift to the east, harbor worlds upon worlds. Within the mountains’ mosaic of high plateaus, deep-cut valleys and steeply [...]

GIZ: The Indo-German project Climate Change Adaptation in Rural Areas of India (CCA RAI, www.ccarai.org) is pleased to announce the launch of the book “Adaptation to Climate Change with a Focus on Rural Areas and India“. The publication provides an overview of the main issues in current adaptation discussions and suggests adaptation options in six [...]

Alertnet: When Reshma Kunda talks about the land surrounding her village, her voice is full of reverence. “Our mountains and forests are like our gods. They give us grass, wood for fuel, water, medicines and food – everything we need for our lives,” says the farmer who lives in Godavari Kunda village, about 15 km [...]

Improved integrated water management practices could increase agricultural production, protect natural systems and improve regional food security A major new survey of the likely effects of climate change on India’s water resources identifies huge challenges to maintaining adequate supplies in the next few decades, but argues that these can be overcome with an integrated, multi-sectorial [...]

National Geographic: We have the knowledge that can contribute to finding solutions to the crisis of climate change. But if you’re not prepared to listen, how can we communicate this to you? — Marcos Terena, Xané leader, Brazil. The precipitous rise in the world’s human population and humankind’s ever-increasing dependence on fossil fuel-based ways of living [...]