[Summit] Neighborhood meeting

[Greg Gerritt]

I hope everyone on this list is planning to come to the SNA Annual Meeting
on Monday evening 7PM at the Rochambeau Library.  The big thin g on the
agenda  for the meeting and for many of us in the neighborhood this year is
planning.  Providence is working on a Comprehensive plan and a Zoning Code.
Here in Summit we are also working on a N Main St Plan.  Folks are working
on a school plan as well.

I have been participating in this planning process, with a primary focus how
does Providence plan for a sustainable city in the time of global warming
and the end of petroleum.  Summit is actually pretty well situated for the
end of petroleum.  We are well served by public transportation and we live
in a walkable community.  We can even walk downtown pretty easily and to the
bus and train stations.

I have also been very concerned about the food supply in the future.
Agriculture will change and it will be much more difficult to ship food
around the world as the climate changes and  gas becomes much more
expensive, so we need to grow a lot more of our own food, right here in
Summit.  Lead by Southside Community Land Trust, a number of us produced a
booklet on urban agriculture in Providence (I will bring some to the meeting
on Monday).  We are also using what we learned when putting together the
booklet to try to influence the zoning code and comprehensive plan so that
Providence becomes much more friendly to growing food, and remembers to
leave room for it in all of our new development.

Several folks have commented that they do not really take seriously how
global warming will effect the food supply, so I am pasiting in an article
talking about exactly that.  Stop global warming with good planning in
Providence, and come out to the national Step it Up to Stop global warming
events in  Providence on April 14.  I am happy to provide more informaiton
on all of these topics.  greg gerritt



    How Global Warming Goes Against the Grain
    By Martin Mittelstaedt
    The Globe and Mail

    Saturday 24 February 2007

    The place where most of the world's people could first begin to feel the
consequences of global warming may come as a surprise: in the stomach, via
the supper plate.

    That's the view of a small but influential group of agricultural experts
who are increasingly worried that global warming will trigger food shortages
long before it causes better known but more distant threats, such as rising
sea levels that flood coastal cities.

    The scale of agriculture's vulnerability to global warming was
highlighted late last year when the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an umbrella organization representing 15 of
the world's top crop research centres, issued an astounding estimate of the
impact of climate change on a single crop, wheat, in one of the world's
major breadbaskets.

    Researchers using computer models to simulate the weather patterns
likely to exist around 2050 found that the best wheat-growing land in the
wide arc of fertile farmland stretching from Pakistan through Northern India
and Nepal to Bangladesh would be decimated. Much of the area would become
too hot and dry for the crop, placing the food supply of 200 million people
at risk.

    "The impacts on agriculture in developing countries, and particularly on
countries that depend on rain-fed agriculture, are likely to be
devastating," says Dr. Louis Verchot, principal ecologist at the World
Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya.

    Wheat, the source of one-fifth of the world's food, isn't the only crop
that could be clobbered by climate change. Cereals and corn production in
Africa are at risk, as is the rice crop in much of India and Southeast Asia,
according to Dr. Verchot.

    In a cruel twist of fate, most of the hunger resulting from global
warming is likely to be felt by those who haven't caused the problem: the
people in developing countries. At the same time, it may be a boon to
agriculture in richer northern countries more responsible for the greenhouse
gas emissions driving climate instability.

    "With climate change, the agricultural areas in Canada, Russia and
Europe will expand, while the areas suited for agriculture in the tropics
will decline," Dr. Verchot says. "Basically, the situation is that those who
are well off now will be better off in the future, and those who are in
problems will have greater problems."

    Agriculture is vulnerable to global warming because the world's most
widely eaten grains - corn, wheat, and rice - are exquisitely sensitive to
higher temperatures. In the tropics and subtropics, many crops are already
being grown just under the maximum temperatures they can tolerate.

    Over the 10,000 years that humans have farmed, temperatures have been
remarkably stable, at current levels or slightly cooler, and plants are
finely attuned to this climate regimen.

    Although it doesn't work exactly the same for each crop, a rough rule of
thumb developed by crop scientists is that, for every 1-degree Celsius
increase in temperatures above the mid-30s during key stages in the growing
season, such as pollination, yields fall about 10 per cent.

    In the case of rice, researchers found the plants were most sensitive to
higher nighttime temperatures. For crops in general, optimum growing
conditions generally range from about 20 to 35 degrees, and then diminish
sharply. At 40 degrees - temperatures that are now starting to occur in many
areas - heat stress causes photosynthesis to shut down. Such high
temperatures are starting to become more common, such as during the
devastating heat wave in much of Europe in the summer of 2003 that killed
tens of thousands.

    Average global temperatures will likely rise between 1.1 to 6.4 degrees
over the next century, according to the authoritative Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, suggesting that, over most of the range of future
temperatures, crops will suffer problematic declines. The panel is also
warning that global warming will alter rainfall patterns, causing increasing
numbers of droughts and floods.

    The threatened wheat-growing area around India is known as the
Indo-Gangetic Plain. Summer temperatures already sometimes reach a sizzling
45 degrees there, even though global warming is in its early days.

    Agricultural researchers with the CGIAR thought the decline in
wheat-growing capacity of the plain, which includes the Punjab, was so
worrisome they hurriedly made the finding public, although the full study in
which it is described, called "Can Wheat Beat the Heat?" is not going to be
released until later this year.

    That such a fabled agricultural region - source of one-sixth of the
global wheat crop - could be severely affected by rising temperatures holds
symbolic importance, because the Indo-Gangetic Plain represents one of the
world's most significant victories against food shortages.

    The area "really is the epicentre of the green revolution in the 1970s,
where wheat and rice scientists saw the first big gains that were coming out
of modern plant-breeding techniques," says Nathan Russell, a spokesman at
the CGIAR, which is based in Washington.

    The worry is that climate change might "erase all of these gains," he
says.

    Perhaps the best-known worrier about climate change and its impact on
agriculture is Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a U.S.
environmental think tank, and proponent of the view that global warming and
agriculture are on a collision course.

    "It certainly looms large," Mr. Brown says of the threat posed to
farming by a warmer world.

    Mr. Brown says the global food larder is already so bare that the impact
of global warming could be felt at any time - even as early as this summer -
if it causes rising temperatures or changing precipitation patterns that
lead to a crop failure in any major agricultural region.

    The food surpluses of yesteryear have been nibbled down to the point
where practically nothing is left in the bin for coping with even one
disappointing harvest, he says.

    "The unfortunate reality is that the cushion for dealing with climate
change now is less than it's been for 34 years, because in six out of the
last seven years world grain production has fallen short of consumption."

    Furthermore, one of the solutions to global warming - using crops to
produce clean-burning bio-fuels such as ethanol - would accentuate any
harvest shortfalls because so much corn, sugar, and soybeans is now being
diverted from the dinner plate to the gas tank.

    The Earth Policy Institute tracks the world's stockpile of grain - the
amount available in storage after accounting for annual use and production -
and says it's down to only 57 days of consumption. This is close to the
modern nadir, a period in the early 1970s of poor harvests when levels fell
so low there was only enough for 56 days. That earlier period of short
supply prompted a doubling of world grain prices - an indication of the
possible consequences if global warming takes a bite out of harvests.

    Even North America's prime piece of agricultural real estate, the
continent's equivalent of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is in the gunsights of
climate change.

    The models that simulate the likely effects of climate change show that
the regions warming the most are at mid to high latitudes, and in
mid-continental areas far from the moderating effects of oceans.

    "Those conditions sort of describe the U.S. corn belt and the Great
Plains, the wheat-growing Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada," Mr. Brown
says. "Since we are the world's bread basket, if we start losing wheat
production and corn production, it's going to affect the entire world."

    The study released by CGIAR did find that rising temperatures would
cause a remarkable northward shift of the wheat belt. The crop could
theoretically be cultivated in a band across the top of North America - from
Cape Harrison, about midway up the coast of Labrador, to Ketchikan, on the
Alaskan panhandle, in the west.

    But agricultural experts say don't bother hoping for northern regions to
become replacement granaries for losses in the tropics. Trading the rich
soils of the Punjab or the U.S. Midwest for the thin soils of Labrador and
the north coast of Lake Superior, in other words, is a bit like a gambler
discarding an ace for a two. It's probably an unwise bet.

    "The northward movement of a climate zone into an area where crops
generally have not been grown does not necessarily mean crops like wheat
will do well there," says Dr. Hans Braun, director of the global wheat
program at CIMMYT, the Mexico-based crop research institute that conducted
the wheat study.

    Scientists have made another worrisome discovery, this time about carbon
dioxide itself, the main greenhouse gas, which is vital for plant
development. It had been assumed in the 1980s, based on greenhouse
experiments, that an atmosphere richer in carbon dioxide would stimulate
plant growth, raising some crop yields by as much as 30 per cent.

    That is part of the reason why, up until now, few people worried much
about agriculture and global warming. It was thought that, while climate
change might wreak havoc on ice-dependent polar bears and low-lying coastal
cities, it held a verdant lining for farmers.

    But new research published last year based on experiments in the U.S.,
Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand found the beneficial effects of carbon
dioxide were vastly overrated when crops were grown in the more realistic
setting of open farm fields, rather than in greenhouses. Corn yields didn't
rise at all, and the rise in wheat and rice yields was less than half
previous estimates.

    To be sure, not everyone is convinced that crop problems are inevitable.

    Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist for BMO Financial Group, says
plant breeders have made remarkable advances in producing crops more
tolerant of extreme conditions. "It's quite amazing what they can do," he
says.

    Mr. Coxe, an investment adviser based in Chicago who follows the
commodity markets, where prices would skyrocket if food shortages develop,
says last year's corn harvest was a case in point.

    Illinois, at the heart of the U.S. corn belt, was sizzled by heat and
drought, but many farmers still managed a decent crop thanks to seeds bred
to give plants more resistance to drought.

    "Illinois was a shocker, frankly, last year, even to ag people. They
were amazed," he says.

    Researchers affiliated with CGIAR have called for a massive program to
develop crops that will be able to cope with global warming, and these
developments may well pan out.

    But if efforts fail, Mr. Brown, for one, is warning the consequences
could be dire, because food supplies are essential for global stability.

    Smaller grain harvests will translate into sharply higher food prices.
Soaring prices, says Mr. Brown, "could lead to urban food riots in scores of
countries around the world, and those food riots could lead to political
instability and that political instability could begin to undermine global
economic progress."

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