ROME, Italy, 4 December 2012 – As the 18th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference proceeds this week in Doha, Qatar, a new scientific study has concluded that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising despite international agreements to reduce them. Reported in the journal Nature Climate Change, the study finds that the emissions – which trap heat in the atmosphere – grew by 3 per cent between 2010 and 2011.

As a result, scientists say, it is increasingly unlikely that global warming can be curbed in the near term. “It has started to sink in that we will be locked into a world that will be at least 2 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average by the end of this century,” notes IFAD Climate Change Adaptation Specialist Gernot Laganda in a blogpost from the Doha conference.

For farmers, and especially for the smallholders whose crops feed much of the developing world, the necessity of adapting to climate change is more urgent than ever.

That urgency is evident at the climate conference, where experts from around the globe are advocating for concerted action. Their deepest concerns involve the impact of more frequent and severe droughts in many regions, as well as extreme weather events such as the ‘superstorm’ that devastated parts of the Caribbean and the eastern United States in late October.

In the run-up to Doha, three expert commentaries on smallholder agriculture and climate change came from IFAD staff who are immersed in these issues every day. Their views were posted in the ‘Climate Conversations’ series on the AlertNet blog of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and on IFAD’s own social reporting blog. In each case, the writers identified pragmatic approaches to the daunting challenges ahead.

Preparedness is key

A farmer maintains vetiver, a new variety of grass planted in Mali. ©IFAD/Amadou Keita

Elwyn Grainger-Jones, Director of IFAD’s Environment and Climate Division, led off with a look at the ramifications of October’s massive hurricane in a post entitled, ‘What lessons can Sandy teach?’

The post begins with Grainger-Jones taking note of “a striking juxtaposition” as he attends a meeting about the effects of climate change in developing countries just when Sandy is paralyzing the US East Coast. The coincidence, he writes, speaks to the need for investment in climate-change preparedness worldwide. But preparedness requires measurements and benchmarks that can be difficult to pinpoint in a field as complex as climate science.

Nevertheless, this task “is absolutely essential,” Grainger-Jones asserts, adding: “An old management adage says that, ‘You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it’. A big effort is needed to improve how we measure climate resilience so that – alongside urgent efforts to curb emissions – we are as ready as we can be for what’s coming.”

Waste to energy

In Guangxi, China, a rural couple uses biogas to cook. ©IFAD/Susan Beccio

Sun Yinhong, IFAD’s Country Programme Officer in Beijing, China, followed with a post on using alternative energy sources in poor rural communities to mitigate climate change, ensure food security and reduce poverty. The post, ‘Turning waste to energy in China’, outlines the benefits of biogas, a low-cost fuel produced from organic waste, which has both household and agricultural uses.

“This methane gas can be used for lighting and cooking and provides benefits to the environment, as it helps reduce deforestation by reducing the need for fuel wood,” Sun writes. “In addition, capturing methane from waste reduces the damaging effects of global warming....”

The post goes on to detail IFAD-funded projects in China’s Guangxi and Sichuan provinces that are working to install biogas converters and construct biogas units in rural households. “We used to cook with wood,” says one participant in the Guangxi project. “Now that we’re cooking with biogas, things are much better.”

Restoring natural resources
Most recently, in ‘Planting for a harsher climate’, Philippe Remy, IFAD’s Country Programme Manager for Mali, addressed the hunger crisis in the Sahel region of West Africa and the ongoing conflict in northern Mali. Taken together, these crises endanger millions of lives.

In the post, Remy notes that “a changing climate is already eroding the natural resources of poor rural people in many parts of Mali, and contributing to a situation of escalating environmental degradation, hunger and poverty.” He quotes a farmer who has witnessed that degradation first-hand. “We have seen changes taking place around us; the rain has become less abundant and the forests and grasslands are disappearing,” the farmer says.

To break the cycle of environmental decline, Remy writes, IFAD has invested in building the capacity of local communities to restore trees and vegetation, and improve agricultural productivity. Such efforts are needed, he concludes, “to ensure that there is enough to sustain a growing population, now and for the future.”

The same might be said of climate-oriented initiatives supported by IFAD and its partners throughout the developing world. Global policy conferences like the one under way in Doha are certainly part of the solution to coping with climate change. But for IFAD – as the ‘Climate Conversations’ viewpoints suggest – hands-on interventions at the grassroots are also crucial.