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Erle Frayne Argonza
Good morning!
Adapting food to climate change has been among the raging challenges of the times. This challenge is now being met head on by screening some specific crops for that purpose.
See the good news below.
[Writ 03 October 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. Thanks to SciDev database news.
World's crops to be screened for climate traits
Katherine Nightingale
22 September 2008 | EN | 中文
A taro plantation. Crops will be screened for adaptable traits to climate change.
Flickr\Richard sihamau
An international foundation is funding a drive to screen thousands of crops for traits that will be useful in adapting food production to climate change.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust is providing around US$300,000 of funding this year for researchers in 21 agricultural institutions in 15 countries across the developing world. Around US$200,000 will be spent next year with a continued commitment in the long term.
Crops from banana to sweet potato will be screened to identify material that plant breeders can use to produce varieties adapted to conditions associated with climate change.
Crop diversity is the biological foundation of agriculture, says Cary Fowler, executive director of the trust.
"Without it agriculture cannot adapt to anything: pests, disease, climate change, drought, energy constraints … nothing. With crop diversity we can have an agricultural system that — if we're smart — is sustainable and productive, can feed people and fuel development."
Researchers will screen the crops by growing them in different stress conditions — such as high salinity or high temperature — and assessing how well they grow.
Varieties with positive traits will be put into an open access database, says Fowler.
Some will also be entered into a 'pre-breeding' programme. Integrating one or two genes from an old or wild variety into a modern variety is costly and difficult, says Fowler, and pre-breeding produces early-stage, new varieties with the desired traits, so that plant breeders can get a 'head start' on producing varieties for farmers' fields.
"Plant breeders often have to make quick progress so they're loathe to get involved in the kind of cutting edge research to put exotic traits in [a crop]. So the pre-breeding at least gets that first set of genes into some kind of form that is easier for a plant breeder.”
Funded projects include a scheme in Papua New Guinea to screen over 20 varieties of the root crop taro for drought and salinity resistance. Taro is particularly important to the poor island communities of the Pacific region, as it need not be harvested for a number of years, making for a sustainable source of food and an ‘insurance policy’ at times when the prices of other staple crops become too high.
A programme in Bangladesh will screen varieties of the grass pea, a hardy crop that is often the only crop left in times of environmental stress and grown by the poorest communities.
Long-term consumption of grass pea can lead to paralysis, as the plant produces a neurotoxin — giving people a choice between starvation or paralysis. Researchers will search for varieties with low levels of this neurotoxin.
Erle Frayne Argonza
So many of our scientific models of ecological reality need gross revisions. I am aware for instance that the model for the ‘water cycle’ is badly flawed, yet the scientific community has not done much to revise it.
Here is another facet of reality—climate change—where the existing models are found to be flawed. From East Asian scientists, notably Beijing, come the observation that the existing models ‘ignore brown carbon’. It need not belabored that the models must be revised.
The news about the observations regarding the model is contained below. What is gladdening is that scientists were able to uncover the flaw, which will ensure revision of the model and the practical technologies coming out from the labs later.
[28 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. Thanks to SciDev database news.]
Current climate models ‘ignoring brown carbon’
Sun Xiaohua and Jia Hepeng
15 August 2008 | EN | 中文
Smog over Bangkok, Thailand
Flickr/gullevek
[BEIJING] Scientists have found that air pollution from East Asia contains an abundance of ‘brown carbon’ particles and say that atmospheric models need updating to incorporate their effect.
Current climate models take into account two types of aerosol carbon — organic carbon and black carbon — that arise from the burning of fossil fuels or biomass.
Black carbon strongly warms the atmosphere by absorbing light, while organic carbon absorbs light at a negligible level and has no warming effect.
It has already been claimed black carbon plays a much larger role in global warming than estimates made by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (see Black carbon climate danger ‘underestimated’).
But this approximation is too simple, according to Peter Crozier, an associate professor at Arizona State University (ASU) in the United States, whose team published their research in Science last week (8 August).
According to the authors, the method that is currently used to measure the warming effect of different types of particle doesn’t take into account the wide variations that can occur between types of carbon from different sources.
They instead used a technique based on a specialised type of electron microscope to directly determine the optical properties of individual carbon particles, and found that samples taken from above the Yellow Sea, east of China, have an abundance of brown carbon particles.
“Brown carbon has light absorbing properties that lie between strongly absorbing black carbon and materials that only scatter light and do not absorb,” co-author James Anderson, a research scientist at ASU’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, told SciDev.Net.
He adds that brown carbon both cools the Earth’s surface and warms the atmosphere, resulting in a complex role in global warming, hence the necessity to incorporate it into climate models.
Hu Guoquan, a senior scientist at the Beijing-based National Climate Centre, welcomes the study, saying it highlights the uncertainties of IPCC models.
“But more studies on the chemical structure and size of brown carbon particles must be done,” he told SciDev.Net.
In addition, Hu says, as many carbon aerosols pollutants are emitted by China or India — which have massive combustion of fossil fuels and biomass — judging their accurate warming or cooling effect must be done cautiously and avoid claims without sufficient scientific evidence, as this will contribute to determining the nations’ responsibilities in global warming.
Erle Frayne Argonza
On a case to case basis, each country has taken certain forms of action regarding climate change. India had recently formulated its action plan for climate change, a plan that served well as input to its cooperative efforts with South Asian countries.
The report is shown below.
Happy reading!
[12 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. Thanks to SciDev database news.]
India launches climate change action plan
T. V. Padma
4 July 2008 | EN
India’s solar mission aims to make its solar energy industry as competitive as its fossil fuel industry
Flickr/z1zzy
[NEW DELHI] India released its national action plan on climate change this week (30 June) with a focus on harnessing renewable energy rather than stringent emissions targets.
India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh released the plan ahead of his attendance at next week’s (7–9 July) G8 summit in Japan where climate change is expected to be discussed.
The action plan spells out eight priority missions that will promote India’s development objectives, with the “co-benefit” of tackling climate change.
The eight missions are: solar energy, enhanced energy efficiency, sustainable habitats, water conservation, sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem, developing a ‘green’ India, sustainable agriculture and building a strategic knowledge platform on climate change.
“Over a period of time, we must pioneer a graduated shift from economic activity based on fossil fuels to one based on non-fossil fuels, and from reliance on non-renewable and depleting sources of energy to renewable sources of energy,” Singh said.
The missions will be managed by the appropriate ministries, and specific programmes within the missions will be finalised by December.
Of these, solar energy will receive a big thrust. India receives the equivalent of about 5,000 trillion kilowatt hours of energy from the sun each year — 5.5 kilowatt hours per square metre each year — with most areas experiencing clear, sunny weather for 250 to 300 days.
The solar mission aims to tap this natural resource and make the country’s solar energy industry as competitive as the fossil fuel industry by setting up a new research centre, entering into research collaborations and encouraging technology transfer.
The plan does not spell out greenhouse gas emission targets, but states that per capita emissions in India will not exceed levels in industrialised countries. India is the world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in absolute terms, but lies behind the US and Europe in terms of annual per capita emissions it (1.2 tonnes compared to 20 and 9.4 tonnes respectively).
The international environmental organisation Greenpeace, said in a statement that the plan is a “welcome first step” but has some weak areas that need to be addressed.
“The plan lacks clear policy prescriptions and targets for improving energy efficiency and reducing transportation emissions,” Srinivas Krishnaswamy, policy advisor for Greenpeace, India, told SciDev.Net.
“They should have placed more emphasis on mandatory emission standards,” he added.
Erle Frayne Argonza
Good morning from Manila!
Climate change is among the world’s hottest environmental and developmental issues. Climate change alone has so many facets to it, and some issues are so contentious they border hoax.
Below is a news item from South Asia, concerning concerted efforts by stakeholders to address climate change.
Happy reading!
[13 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. Thanks to SciDev database news.]
South Asian nations join forces to tackle climate change
Source: IRIN
9 July 2008 | EN | 中文
The countries have pledged to improve monitoring and exchange of information on impacts such as rising sea levels
Flickr/Sumaiya Ahmed
South Asian nations have adopted a three-year environmental action plan to reduce the impact of climate change in the region.
Environmental ministers from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — adopted the declaration in Dhaka, Bangladesh, last week (3 July) following a three-day summit.
The action plan covers 2009–2011, with countries pledging to improve monitoring and exchange of information on disaster preparedness and extreme events, meteorological data, information on climate change impacts such as increased sea levels, glacial melting and biodiversity, and capacity for clean development mechanism projects.
The ministers called for more technology to fight climate change and better technology and knowledge transfer between SAARC member states.
They also called for a South Asia fund on climate change, with further discussions scheduled for the next SAARC summit in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in July.
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