Summary:

A recent estimate suggests that around one third of the greenhouse gas mitigation required between now and 2030 can be provided by carbon drawdown through Natural Climate Solutions. Natural Climate Solutions, roughly speaking, mean ecological restoration. Yet they have so far attracted only 2.5% of mitigation funding, and far too little political attention. (emphasis added)

Given that they have major advantages over alternative negative emissions strategies and can also deliver wide ecological and social benefits, we call for a great increase in the attention and spending devoted to Natural Climate Solutions, as part of a massively enhanced global effort to prevent both climate breakdown and ecological collapse.

Rationale

1. There is now a broad consensus among climate scientists that the reduction of current greenhouse gas emissions will be insufficient to avert 1.5°C or more of global heating. This is because mitigation efforts have probably been left too late to avoid this critical threshold.

2. This means that the gap will have to be bridged by Negative Emissions Strategies: in other words, drawing greenhouse gases that have already been released out of the […]

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Beijing, China, Aug. 2006 Credit: Flickr/Anders Sandberg

For decades, China was reluctant to deem climate change a national security issue, preferring instead to view it through the lens of development. The driving concern behind China’s reticence was sovereignty; Beijing feared that crisis rhetoric about climate change would be used to legitimate interventionist actions on the part of Western powers, including forcing Beijing to curtail its economic growth. Influential Chinese commentators called efforts to limit emissions “a conspiracy by developed nations” to contain the Middle Kingdom’s development, even as the Chinese military quietly acknowledged in a 2010 white paper on national defense that climate change contributes to security concerns. While the U.S. military recognized climate change was a potential national security issue in 2008, that same year, Chinese state media featured an editorial warning against “sensationalizing [climate change] as a security issue.”

The official positions of the U.S. and China have reversed in recent years. Despite decades of acceptance among U.S. military and civilian national security leadership that climate change poses a threat to U.S. interests, […]

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Red-winged blackbirds over an irrigation ditch in Blythe, California.
Credit: Trent Davis Bailey/The Guardian

Four hours east of Los Angeles, in a drought-stricken area of a drought-afflicted state, is a small town called Blythe where alfalfa is king. More than half of the town’s 94,000 acres are bushy blue-green fields growing the crop.

Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.

Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.

The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.

Each month, Fondomonte Farms loads the alfalfa on to […]

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Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia.
Credit: Mitch Epstein

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