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GROWING FOOD IN A FINITE WORLD Case studies of The Nature Conservancys key agriculture solutions Move logo? Make smaller? Smarter Agriculture PracticesCLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS ELIMINATING DEFORESTATION FROM COMMODITY SUPPLY CHAINS PRECISION AGRICULTURE SUSTAINABLE INTENSIFICATION Smarter Agriculture Practices Experts agree that world food production will need to massively increase by 2050. But such production cannot be achieved by doubling land or water usequite simply, there is not enough of either. Agriculture must get smarter, using land more productively and water more efficiently if we are to reconcile the need for growth with the need to preserve all of our natural resources, safeguard natural habitats and keep the climate in safe boundaries. At The Nature Conservancy, we know we cannot achieve mission success without addressing unsustainable agricultural practices, whether in the fields where crops are produced, in the forests where agriculture is in encroaching, or on the rangelands where animals graze. These case studies offer an overview of five strategies we are working on: sustainable intensification, precision agriculture, decision support systems, climate smart agriculture, and eliminating deforestation from commodity supply chains. While not all-encompassing, these case studies provide an overview of our thinking and of the types of projects we invest in. Ours is an ambitious visionto achieve our objectives, tens of millions of farmers across the world need to change their behaviors. But by targeting our work in the right places and influencing the right set of public and private institutions, we are moving from the theory to the practice of change, ensuring we can feed a growing population while maintaining a balance between development and conservation. THE NATURE CONSERVANCY Stanley, fruit and vegetable farmer on his farm in the Upper Tana Watershed, Kenya. Photo credit: Nick Hall Case Studies:O f all the risks facing the world food system, climate change is the greatest. Rising populations and growing demand also present challenges, but humans have historically been good at improving agricultural technology when they have to, and increasing input as required. Climate change is a different and a more dangerous type of threat: it is challenging our ability to respond with technology alone. Threats linked to climate change come in different shapes and forms. As weather patterns change, farmers and ranchers need to adapt to shifting crop and livestock footprints: what once grew or grazed somewhere may have to move. Weather variability will also increase, although farmers are used to coping with variable weather. The most worrying risk is that climate change will cancel out any increases in agricultural productivity or advances in agricultural technology in two ways: hitting yields there is already some evidence of that with maize and wheat; reducing land available for food production, through flooding associated with rising sea levels, increased salinity in river deltas, and, most worrying of all, desertification as areas become dryer, topsoil erodes more easily. The only way to respond is by developing climate smart agriculture, which has two dimensions. One is to mitigate or lessen: reducing agricultures contribution to climate change. The other is to adapt: reducing the impact of climate change on agriculture by making it more resilient. There is also a catch: all this has to be done while increasing agricultural production, to keep pace with rising demand. REDUCING THE IMPACT OF AGRICULTURE ON CLIMATE CHANGE Agriculture is itself an important driver of climate change, responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions through deforestation and habitat conversion, livestock, soil carbon loss, and fertilizer use. TNC is working around the world to reduce agricultures impacts: helping companies and governments to eliminate deforestation along commodity supply chains, such as soy and beef in Brazil and palm oil in Indonesia; A Kenyan woman picking tea on a tea plantation in the Upper Tana Watershed, Kenya. TNC Global Agriculture Climate Smart Agriculture working with farmers in the corn-belt in the United States, helping to reduce fertilizer use with no impact on yields and using better management practices; researching the potential impact of precision agriculture, reducing excess and waste in the use of all agricultural inputs; working with farmers and ranchers in the US, Africa and Latin America on improved soil health and increasing the organic content in soils, which can have important mitigation benefits. In addition, our innovative decision support systems help reduce the amount of land converted to agriculture to the minimum necessary, which minimizes greenhouse gas emissions. REDUCING THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON AGRICULTURE TNC is working around the world to make agricultural systems more resilient and help farmers adapt to climate change: in the US, we are looking at how to use our extensive network of hundreds of TNC-owned farms and ranches for research to help farmers and ranchers improve land management practices; in Africa, we are working with local communities and government agencies in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia to help small farmers and ranchers diversify production systems and maintain pasture quality in semi-arid environments; and in South America, we are helping ranchers in Colombia and elsewhere to develop integrated production systems that combine grazing with crop production and forestry and which are much more resilient in the face of changing rainfall patterns. THE NATURE CONSERVANCY: CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE Children walk through burned areas along the shore of Lake Tanganyika where farmers are growing crops in the village of Nkonkwa, Tanzania. Ami Vitale/TNC CONTACT Katie Bucien | kbucienTNC FURTHER INFORMATION These factsheets are part of a global series highlighting TNCs work around the world to improve agricultural practices as demand for food and land increases. T o learn more, visit nature or follow nature_press on T witter. The Nature Conservancy is a global conservation organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends. Guided by science, we create innovative, on-the-ground solutions to our worlds toughest challenges so that nature and people can thrive together. We are tackling climate change, conserving lands, waters and oceans at unprecedented scale, and helping make cities more sustainable. Working in more than 65 countries, we use a collaborative approach that engages local communities, governments, the private sector, and other partners.H ow do we balance the competing demands of development and conservation? One way is to use science to work out whether the demands really are competing often they arent. If they are, it is still important to find the best possible trade-off. The technologies of mapping and spatial analysis are evolving very rapidly, and opening up new ways of planning land management. Food comes from landscapes divided between different land-uses farming, ranching, conservation, restoration. The secret is to find out where maximum production can happen for the highest possible return on investment but with minimal environmental impact. Decision support systems guide planners, land managers, communities and policy-makers through that process. Many different end users find decision support systems useful: local and national governments can use decision support systems to decide where to protect land, where to restore degraded and marginal lands, and where to steer agricultural development; companies implementing a deforestation commitment can use decision support systems to identify where they can meet demand most responsibly from land still available for development; farmers and ranchers can identify degraded soils and pasture that could be recovered for production, or underperforming places where yields could be increased; conservation groups can identify where to reforest and restore habitat for maximum impact; aid agencies and rural development groups can see where it might make most sense to invest in climate smart agriculture; and banks and financial institutions can use decision support systems as a risk assessment tool when deciding where and how to invest. Santarem, Brazil an example of successful zoning of soy plantations and forest. David Cleary Global Agriculture Decision Support Systems THE EVOLUTION OF DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS In the past, decision support systems got limited traction because environmental groups thought too much about the science and too little about adoption. End users beyond the environmental community were not involved in their development, so these systems did not meet real world needs. TNC insists that potential end users sit on design teams and gives them the final word in setting terms of reference for our technical teams. We co-create the tools, ensuring their technical quality and overseeing their environmental dimension. End users who are usually not environmentalists need to determine the framework if the tools are to be adopted. HOW DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS WORK To the end user, a decision support system is a piece of technology such as an app or a program on a computer that sits behind a map. It allows users to formulate questions, set different kinds of parameters, and then use the tool to model the answer to questions they might want to pose about the future of the area, zooming in or out depending on what scale is needed from local community to nation state. The system is designed to be easy to use, and assumes the user is knowledgeable but not a scientist or technical expert. The interface is visually simple. However, behind it the tool works by layering many different kinds of information environmental, economic, agronomic and social and applying algorithms to allow users to set parameters and create their own maps. This enables them to see the implications of different kinds of decision, assess the impacts, and make the best possible land management or investment decision. Typical questions might be: Where can I increase yields with no expansion of the existing crop footprint? What natural habitat is the most important for me to preserve if I want to maintain water quality? Where could more intensive ranching systems be developed on land already cleared? Where are land tenure systems unclear and the level of land conflict high, making them risky to invest in? Where are environmental risks low and responsible production systems in place, making them good investment options? Where would be a good place to site this grain storage facility or that food processing plant, where habitat conversion would be minimal but there is plenty of potential for yield to increase? Aerial view of crop fields and farms east of the city of Foz do Iguau. On the right is the forested Iguau National Park which borders one side of the Iguau River in the state of Parana, Brazil. Scott Warren THE NATURE CONSERVANCY: DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS y w N NGOF EXAMPLES OF TNCS WORK In Brazil and Paraguay, we are using decision support systems to help the soy industry implement “zero deforestation commitments” in the Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco. In Tanzania, we are developing decision support systems to help the Tanzanian government assess investment proposals and make land use and water management decisions in the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor. In the Brazilian Cerrado, we are identifying where ranching can expand through intensification rather than converting grasslands. Screen shot of prototype /ssd.agrosatelite.br TNC CONTACT Katie Bucien | kbucienTNC FURTHER INFORMATION These factsheets are part of a global series highlighting TNCs work around the world to improve agricultural practices as demand for food and land increases. T o learn more, visit nature or follow nature_press on T witter. The Nature Conservancy is a global conservation organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends. Guided by science, we create innovative, on-the-ground solutions to our worlds toughest challenges so that nature and people can thrive together. We are tackling climate change, conserving lands, waters and oceans at unprecedented scale, and helping make cities more sustainable. Working in more than 65 countries, we use a collaborative approach that engages local communities, governments, the private sector, and other partners.A griculture drives 80% of tropical deforestation. While small farmers play a role in this, the big deforestation players are four commodity industries: beef (responsible for more deforestation than any other commodity); palm oil; soy; and the pulp and paper sectors. These four commodities account for $180 bn of the global agricultural economy. It is easy to portray agribusiness in general and these commodities in particular as deforestation villains, but the reality is more complicated. As poverty plunges in Asia, and hundreds of millions of people globally move into higher income brackets, diets are shifting to higher protein and demand for food and consumer products is also going up. The challenge is how to meet that demand while reducing deforestation. The good news is that it can be done. Over the last decade, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen by over 80%, while at the same time it has become one of the major beef producing areas of the world. Hundreds of companies from the relevant commodity supply chains more than half of pulp and paper and palm oil companies; around one-fifth of soy companies; about one in eight beef companies have made commitments to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains completely. Many of these companies put these “zero deforestation” commitments into the 2014 UN New York Declaration o
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