climate change

The U.S. Forest Service released a new report on Monday, detailing the effects of drought on forests and rangelands.

Four of the world's most populous nations -- China, India, the U.S. and Brazil -- "are responsible for 46 percent of the world's nitrogen emissions," says the University of Sydney, which led an international collaboration to calculate the first-ever global nitrogen footprint.

The hottest year on record just ended - 2015 - "a burst of heat that has continued into the new year and is roiling weather patterns all over the world," said the New York Times.

Amigo Bob Cantisano, dreadlocks to his waist and clad year-round in shorts and tie-dyed shirts, hunts in the remnants of homesteads, small orchards and stagecoach stops dating from the Gold Rush days in northern California. Rather than mineral wealth, the treasure he seeks "are trees, the fruits and nuts and ornamentals planted ... in the late 1800s," said public broadcaster KQED in a story produced in partnership with FERN.

Researchers say that over a four-decade period ending in 2007, the world lost a tenth of its cereal grain crops, such as rice, wheat and corn, due to droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather, reports the New York Times.

Wood industries, ranging from pulp and paper mill to saw mills, were among the hardest-hit by the global recession in 2008-09 and finally are recovering, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Paris agreement on climate change was "a game changer," according to the FAO director general for giving priority to food security in its preamble. But, notes Think Progress, the text of the agreement does not mention food security or agriculture at all.

A study of 235 lakes representing half of the world's freshwater supply found that climate change is warming lakes more rapidly than the land or ocean, said research presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week. Researchers looking at records over the past 25 years found that lakes warmed by an average of 0.61 degrees F per decade.

When monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico for the winter, they flock to oyamel fir trees which grow on mountainsides at altitudes of 10,000 feet. "These dense, dark-green conifers protect the monarchs from cold and rainy winter nights," says Yale e360. With climate change, the firs are affected by hotter and drier conditions.

PARIS - Jean Marc Touzard, an economist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, watched the climate change conference with interest and anticipation last week. He leads an interdisciplinary team in a wide-ranging venture to prepare France’s wine industry for the hotter, drier climate of the future. A study in 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicted that up to 85 percent of the vineyards in the European Mediterranean would become too warm and dry to grow grapes using current practices if global warming continued unabated.

Eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change, says research by Carnegie Mellon University. It says "following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie."

The climate-change deal signed in Paris "is a game-changer" for the 800 million hungry people in the world, because it is the first global agreement to give priority to food security, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

PARIS – Due to an initiative launched by France, there is now an international framework that for the first time brings agricultural soils into climate negotiations. Called “4 per 1000,” this new proposal aims to protect and increase carbon stocks in soil.

As environment ministers hashed out the details of a climate change agreement, FERN correspondent Daniel Grossman sat down with two prominent experts in Paris to talk about the impact of climate change on agriculture.

At the Paris climate negotiations, authorities are starting to pay attention to agriculture as a way to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Food production accounts for about one-third of all emissions, yet prior climate conferences have focused almost exclusively on energy production systems such power plants. In an interview, Hans Herren, who co-chaired the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development—nicknamed the IPCC report for agriculture—in 2008, spoke about agro-ecology as a climate mitigator.

There are three times more cattle, hogs, sheep and chickens on earth than people, says Ensia, and with meat consumption on the rise around the world, the trend is toward mutton and chicken.

Researchers from Sweden's Linköping University say emissions of greenhouse gases from natural sources will increase during global warming, with the result that climate change will progress at faster-than-expected rates.

In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.