Global Climate Change and Environmental Policy

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as early as in 1976 talked about the potential ill effects of the increased accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere on the future climate and weather. The WMO along with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) did establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 with a mandate to provide scientific information to governments on the risks associated with climate change and its impacts on natural and human systems. No doubt climate change is one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century having a profound impact on the needs of the global population, poverty alleviation, sustenance of natural ecosystems and food security. Climate change is no longer considered to be just an environmental concern but also a development problem affecting both the developing and developed countries. One of the central policy issues in the context of climate change is how countries of the world should allocate resources. After a few years of intense engagement and international negotiation processes, the world community has signed the historic Paris climate agreement in 2015, which calls for substantive domestic and international climate actions to tackle climate issues. Individual countries are making efforts to strengthen their “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) by streamlining their mitigation and adaptation initiatives. Some of the areas where investments have been made to reshape policies and actions include (i) renewable energy, (ii) building of rural and urban resilience capacity, (iii) poverty alleviation and (iv) sectoral priorities. The environmental governance focus is also shifting from National to the sub-National and local level. Internationally, there have been considerable efforts in synchronising the INDC commitments with the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). One of the key policy agreement that Parties entered under the Paris agreement is to stabilise rising temperature below 2 °C preferably to limit to 1.5 °C. At the local level, policy actions should focus on assessing the vulnerability of both physical and social systems to climate change, development of best bet technology to reduce the impacts of climate change and measures to enhance the adaptive capacities of local communities and enhance overall climate risk management capacity of the region. Transformative changes could be achieved by developing and executing proactive environmental and climate risk management policies, promoting effective implementation strategies and linking responsive institutions across scales for achieving activities effectively. Though developed countries are fundamentally responsible for global warming, the major impacts are borne by poor and marginalised countries. Hence, the international climate regime needs innovative climate policies and institutional structures that would help promote international cooperation. It is also imperative to design and implement appropriate national climate policies that would contribute to individual countries’ green growth and promote climate-sensitive development. This chapter focuses on the elements that go into the making of climate policy and their relevance to the emerging global and national scenarios.

Natural disasters like droughts have worsened the conditions of the villages of Bundelkhand region, India. Droughts have caused a diverse impact on the economic, environmental and social conditions of the districts. Therefore, in order to identify the variability of vulnerability, Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) was calculated to assess the vulnerability, with the purpose of identifying relevant adaptation response mechanisms. The index is applied in a comparative study of four selected watersheds of Bundelkhand region, that is Ur watershed (Tikamgarh district, Madhya Pradesh), Kathan watershed (Chhatarpur–Sagar district, Madhya Pradesh), Patrahi–Lakheri watershed (Jhansi district, Uttar Pradesh) and Sajnam watershed (Lalitpur district, Uttar Pradesh). The sub-watershed-based classification was used to assess the vulnerability of people, livelihood and ecosystem to climate change, using primary and secondary data, to identify highly vulnerable sub-watersheds within a watershed, and a comparative analysis was done amongst the four districts. The LVI–IPCC approach was used to reflect the vulnerability based on 39 environmental and socio-economic sub-indicators, through IPCC-identified components: exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The overall vulnerability results reveal that the Ur watershed in Tikamgarh district was the most vulnerable to climate change than the rest due to high sensitivity and less adaptive capacity. The findings helped in suggesting sector specific as well as overall drought management and adaptation strategies to cope up with the climate change. These can be implemented by the state government and the local bodies to reduce the vulnerability and enhance adaptive capacity of all the four drought-prone districts.

Adjustments and adaptive responses to diminishing resources (land, water, and energy) in agriculture due to population increase and climate change in the recent decades are varied. Proactive adaptive coping mechanisms must be instituted to avoid the onslaught of massive starvation. Organic and agroecological innovations are the logical options. But organic farming is not one-size-fits-all solution. While organic farming is considered as one of the solutions to farming in crisis, there are many barriers to its adoption. Among these constraints are (1) the nature of organic farming being difficult, laborious, and knowledge and skills intensive, the required environment (air, soil, and water), and the certification requirement and (2) the support systems from government and consumers not in place.

Scaling up the adoption of organic farming has a number of prerequisites, specifically:

In the past few decades, unparalleled efforts have been made to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels, aiming to reduce air pollution and lessen the climate change effect. Fossil fuel burning in the energy sector is the significant contributor to GHG, global warming and climate change. These scenarios have motivated scientists and policy makers to look for eco-friendly energy supply options with enhanced energy efficiency. Globally, biofuels, considered as a substitute for fossil fuels, have become top priority due to its eco-friendly nature, and many energy policy initiatives have taken place, especially in biofuel production and its use, and various advances in technology are in progress. The biofuel policies are instrumental in improving energy security by reducing foreign oil imports by promoting renewable energy resource. The government is also focusing on advances in research and industrial development on biofuel and biomass-based economy. New policy initiatives have ample opportunities for biofuel production from agricultural residues, industrial waste, and other wastes, which exist as unused or surplus. The sustainable production of biofuel and its use as a substitute for fossil fuels and related policy initiatives would help in the mitigation of climate change.

Agriculture is one of the key domains that is significantly affected by climate change. The chapter presents the observed and projected impact of climate change on freshwater resources globally. In addition to this, case studies of successful implementation of adaptation measures adopted to tackle climate change-induced water stress in agriculture have been discussed with a special focus on high-altitude farming systems particularly vulnerable to increasing climate risk. As one of the potential adaptation measures, the relevance of water footprint as a tool to optimize water use and strategize cropping patterns with respect to crop water use efficiency and prevailing climatic conditions has also been discussed.

Enteric methane emission in ruminants in addition to being an environmental pollutant causes a loss of 10–11% of the total gross energy intake of the animal. The various strategies available to mitigate enteric methane emission include management strategies, feeding strategies, rumen manipulation and advanced strategies. Feeding strategies are practical approaches to mitigate enteric methane emission and can be practiced with ease by farmers under field conditions. Various approaches that cause rumen manipulation and thereby reduce enteric methane emission are supplementation of bacteriocins, ionophores, fats, oils, organic acids, probiotics, prebiotics, sulphate, halogenated methane analogues, nitroxy compounds, fungal metabolite, secondary plant metabolites, microalgae and exogenous enzymes. In the Indian context, ruminant livestock are grazed in wastelands or fed with poor-quality agricultural waste, whose digestibility is low, and the nutritional requirement of the animals is not met resulting in poor productivity. Improving per animal productivity is a potent tool to reduce enteric methane emission per unit of product produced, and this can be achieved through ration balancing. As regards the greenhouse gas abatement opportunities, measures to reduce enteric methane production have immense economic and ecological benefits to the farmers.

Agroforestry is considered as “a sustainable land use system that includes the use of woody perennial, agricultural crops and animals in combination to achieve beneficial ecological and economical interactions for food, fiber and livestock production”. However, limited understanding, incorrect information, insufficient awareness and a negative mindset could hinder the benefits of this practice. The survey was conducted in Limpopo Province by the Agricultural Research Council, University of Venda and Water Research Commission (WRC). The research is fully funded by the WRC. The aim of the survey was to identify and describe the farmer’s benefits from timber-based mixed farming/ agroforestry cultivation in Limpopo Province. A total of 65 smallholder farmers participated in the study and were spread in districts as follows: Vhembe (40), Capricorn (21) and Mopani (4). Sixty-five potential smallholder agroforestry farmers were selected through a “purposive sampling technique” from the list of farmers’ provided by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) and Forestry South Africa Limpopo. Quantitative and qualitative designs were adopted along with the use of questionnaire, stakeholder’s discussion and field observations. Data was coded, captured and analysed using SPSS. The results indicated that some farmers in Limpopo Province were generating income through renting of farms for grazing and selling trees to the communities to build shelter, kraals, medicinal purposes, fuelwood, etc. Those farmers with access to water were able to grow crops and sell their produce at local communities, local municipality and international market. The majority of farmers also indicated that they were also benefiting from nitrogen fixation, increased crop production, economic gain, soil conservation and improved soil quality and sequestration of atmospheric carbon as a result of timber-based mixed farming/agroforestry practice. The identified farmers’ benefits were in line with some of the researchers’ field observations. It is thus recommended that stakeholders should take note of the benefits identified by farmers in an attempt to increase agroforestry farmers’ participation.

One of the most promising ways to mitigate climate change is through “agriculture and landscape climate solutions”: the conservation, restoration and improved management of agriculture and natural land in order to increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in landscapes worldwide. In this perspective, the agriculture sector is facing a wide rethinking on the way to better integrate environment and climate change issues into agriculture policies.

Schools of thinking towards sustainable agriculture and agroecology are competing with new concepts such as sustainable land management, climate-smart agriculture and low-carbon agriculture. On the other hand, policymakers and donors face the issue of integration of mitigation and adaptation in agriculture policies and investment programmes. New performance indicators such as carbon footprint and carbon balance are used to select value and promote high-performing options. Similarly, food markets progressively provide products with reduced carbon footprint.

Implementing such new and marketing mechanisms slowly induce a progressive transformation of the food value chains, agriculture policies and incentives. However, high inertia does remain in the agricultural sector, slowing down the switch towards real low-carbon agriculture options. This chapter does analyse a series of shortcuts used by countries and donors to stimulate such structural change, considering appropriate appraising tools, new incentive mechanisms, new modalities of funding and acting with scaling-up perspectives. Agroforestry value chains upgrading scenarios such as cocoa or shea parkland restoration are provided as examples of upscaling paths with high-carbon-fixing performances. The issues covered in this chapter include “environmental policy”, “sustainable agriculture”, “climate-smart agriculture”, “climate mitigation and adaptation”, “global food policy” and “low-carbon agriculture”.

Agriculture is highly vulnerable to climate change and climate variability. It is very difficult to balance the growing interest on sophistication and climate change mitigation options. Now, we are in the stage of bolstering adaptation process to cope up our production with demand. Automated Agro Advisory Service (AAS) is a response farming tool, which helps the farmers to get timely weather based agro advisories to make necessary decision for the next few days of farm operations. The AAS requires past and forecasted weather data of 6 days from the current date for closer spatial scale, high performance computing server, faster internet service, short messaging service (SMS) and web cum mobile application. Different combinations of temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and rainfall quantity have been numbered as weather scenarios. Weather based agro advisory for multiple crops and different stages of crop growth have been developed with the help of technocrats and incorporated in the database. Farmers have to register their mobile number for advisory to their own crop, specific to crop stage. Every day, weather scenario of each block will be developed separately for past and future weather and the AAS module match the scenario, crop, stage, and advisory and send the selected advisory to the farmers’ mobile as SMS. Farmers can change their crops and sowing date through web portal or mobile app. The AAS simplifies the lab to land with ICT tools and helps the farmers to get rid of weather risk and help them to increase productivity of inputs. The AAS empathises the farmers’ need and acts weather smart.

Climate change is the most critical threat to food security amid increasing crop demand. This increasing demand for food has been previously tried to be met through the use of synthetic fertilizers and effective application of weed- and pest-controlling chemicals. However, these methods of increasing crop productivity rely on finite resources and are often unsustainable. They are now proven to be posing a great threat to the environment and causing a negative change in the planet’s natural climate. Fortunately, the threat has been realized by scientists, and the world has started to lay the foundations for sustainable intensification of agriculture and to heighten the resilience of crops to climate change. The solutions discovered so far are numerous with many of them not yet tested. Climate change assessment is the first priority in this regard. Much of the recent researches have demonstrated a multi-scale and multidimensional nature of climate change to assess the potential effects of climate change on agriculture and the options for adaptation. These options for adaptation have been different in different regions of the world with clear differences among strategies in rich and poor countries. The pressure for adaptation is greatest in poor countries where the adaptive capacity is least abundant. Adaptation to climate change could be autonomous (market-driven) or planned. Both of these adaptation strategies are driven by certain measures. Some adaptation strategies are easily achieved with the help of existing technologies, some need development of new technologies while others just need policy and institutional/market reforms. Numerous researchers have tried to assess and give tools for the potential impact of climate change which are largely based on modelling techniques. Indeed, models are useful tools for assessing this potential impact and evaluating the options for adaptation, yet they do not match the level of real solutions that could be brought about by efficient adaptive human agency. The importance of agriculture as performance is useful in counterbalancing the modelling approaches towards mitigating the negative impacts of climate change. The adaptation and mitigation strategies are and should be social phenomena which need social attendance in the form of improved and sustainable agricultural practices and could help agriculture contribute less to the changing climate. This chapter will focus on numerous strategies that could be adapted to assess and cope with the negative impacts of changing climate on agriculture.

The efforts to reduce impacts of climate change have been taken by many African countries especially those which are highly exposed to the changing climatic condition and weather extremes. Many attempts have been directed in agriculture to adapt to climate change as agriculture is the main source of economy and livelihoods of the large population in these countries. Extension services, in particular, have been at the centre of the efforts taken by governments to build farmers’ adaptation capacity for the impacts of climate change. This chapter reviews and analyses the current level of extension practices and the capacity building of smallholders farmers with specific reference to Tanzania and other countries such as Senegal, Malawi and Kenya. In particular, this chapter will look at how farmers can be adaptable to climate-smart agriculture (CSA) technologies. In doing so, this chapter will look at what extent climate change affects the agriculture sector of Tanzania, assess the CSA technologies’ and practices’ adaptation in the farming activities and examine extension approaches/methods being used to address the agricultural challenges in Tanzania and also in relation to the lessons learned from the other African countries (Senegal, Malawi and Kenya).

As gender inequalities persist around the world, “women and men are experiencing climate change differently, affecting the ability of individuals and communities to adapt”. The intersection of climate change and gender policy is more concerned with gender differences and gender mainstreaming. Though men and women are negatively influenced by the impacts of climate change, women quite often experience more burden and are indeed more vulnerable than men, due to the factors like “social status”, working conditions and hardships. Indeed, the vulnerability of women owes to prevailing socio-economic conditions and social fabric. Many women in developing countries depend on the natural environment for subsistence and income. They even played a central role in agriculture and natural resource management, but due to lack of economic opportunities, women have very limited or no access in decision-making processes. Therefore, it is important that the consequences of climate change should not lead already marginalized sections of communities into further deprivation. The threats posed by climate change have failed to impress on policy-makers the importance of placing women at the heart for ensuring a sustainable future by combining development and climate change issues. Skewed participation of women in the processes involving “decision-making”, “planning”, “policy-making” and “implementation” results in increasing their vulnerability to climate change impacts. Gender mainstreaming is the need of the hour as it can engender viable and pragmatic solution to climate change.

The clear evidence of climate change impact demands proactive role by scientists, agronomist and meteorologist for upscaling agricultural production, precision forecast and food safety, especially in the tropical region. The crop simulation model suggests probable growth, development and crop yield for soil-plant-atmosphere dynamics assessment. Decision Support System for Agro-Technology Transfer Model (DSSAT) is an application-based model that gives the best-suited recommendations to achieve sustainability in the agriculture by means of simulation of users’ minimum experimental data that includes weather data pertaining to site, crop growth period, and data concerning the soil, crop management practices, etc.

Identification of the weather and climate-sensitive problems due to extreme weather events on agriculture in any region can be achieved by crop model. Validation and calibration of crop simulation model is necessary with the help of field experimental data which will contain sensitive analysis, impact of epochal (temperature time period), various temperature ranges, different levels of radiation and CO₂, different dates of sowing and various nitrogen and water treatments. Extreme climate change impacts on phenological stages, the growth of a plant, dry matter partitioning to different plant organs for all seasons also need to be studied. Validation, linking and analysis of climate change data for different Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) with bias-corrected climate change data and crop model data using Decision Support System for Agro-Technology Transfer Model (DSSAT) and probability distribution model will be required to investigate climate change impacts on crops. Based on these results, the formulation of:

The research can also be extended by doing a detailed analysis of estimation of soil moisture, evapotranspiration, insolation, vegetation index, growing degree days, standard precipitation index, and land surface temperature. The statistical study of estimated values of above said parameters using probability distribution model, root means square error and bias value of simulated data will be helpful for the development of a hydro-meteorological model, agriculture applications, irrigation planning over arid/semi-arid zones and forecasting systems.