Agri community must work on climate change

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released a series of reports about the visible signs of climate change globally, the most recent a report detailing the growth of greenhouse emissions in the past 10 years.

Agriculture production has a part to play in climate change and agriculture professionals should work hard to reduce greenhouse emissions for their own sake as well as the world population, argues Peter Roney, a consultant at Cambridge Associates with a particular interest in agriculture investing.

“It cannot also be a coincidence that with the growing global demand for protein, the methane produced by livestock accounted for 39 percent of the sector’s total greenhouse gas outputs and had grown by 11 percent between 2001 and 2011,” said Peter Roney, a consultant at Cambridge Associates with a particular interest in agriculture investing.

Farming, forestry and fisheries emission of greenhouse gases nearly doubled in 50 years, according the report that suggests it might increase by another 30 percent by 2050.

IPCC’s Working Group III, which produced the report, argues that it would be possible to limit world temperature rises “using a wide array of technological measures and changes in behavior”, reads a press release.

“However, only major institutional and technological change will give a better than even chance that global warming will not exceed this threshold,” continued the report.

And Roney believes that the agriculture industry is well positioned to effect change.

“As agriculture output has increased in the developing countries and in Asia we have also seen a larger proportion of emissions from those geographical areas,” Roney told Agri Investor.

“The message does seem to be relatively clear – agriculture does have a significant impact on climate change and for the sake of both the global environment and our ability to produce sufficient food for the growing global population, the agriculture industry needs to allocate even more resources than those already being applied to reducing emissions. Perhaps there is also a role for governments to do more to encourage and incentivize new investment into emission-reducing innovations.”