Well, Let's Add This to Our Growing List of Dire Warnings

Another day another warning that humanity is pushing its luck, overstressing this Earth, our one and only biosphere.

For those of you who can't handle stress, don't fret. It'll be down the Memory Hole by the end of the weekend at the outside.  We've already forgotten Tuesday's dire warning from the World Resource Institute about the dire freshwater crisis that has beset a quarter of humanity.  So many crises, so little time, how is a girl supposed to remember them all?

Dirt. Who gives a damn about dirt? Apparently the UN does.  The latest report from its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, visits a recurring theme - soils degradation.

It's a topic that's been considered in depth before. Agronomists have been howling their warnings for years. We're exhausting our stocks of arable land, the soils we need to grow our food. It finally led the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to issue a report in 2014 warning that we were heading toward a collapse in agricultural production within 60 years. Even the best remaining farmland, the agency claimed, were already somewhat degraded. We even got a map showing the then state of soils degradation. Then - whoosh - straight down the Memory Hole.

That 2014 report was followed up by another in 2018 that seemed to disappear into that hole of oblivion even faster. With it was a report warning that we would need a 50 per cent increase in agricultural production to feed the herd in 2050. Damn, if we were just a tiny fraction as good at responding to these warnings as we are at ignoring them, and we're so very good at ignoring them, we might just have some hope. Yeah but ignoring them until we've completely forgotten about them comes just so naturally to us. It's effortless and demands nothing of us and,  when it comes to change, our favourite flavour is nothing.

Today's report layers man-made climate change atop man-made soils degradation. I suppose you've guessed it's not good news.

The climate crisis is damaging the ability of the land to sustain humanity, with cascading risks becoming increasingly severe as global temperatures rise, according to a landmark UN report compiled by some of the world’s top scientists. 

Global heating is increasing droughts, soil erosion and wildfires while diminishing crop yields in the tropics and thawing permafrost near the poles, says the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Further heating will lead to unprecedented climate conditions at lower latitudes, with potential growth in hunger, migration and conflict and increased damage to the great northern forests. 

The report, approved by the world’s governments, makes clear that humanity faces a stark choice between a vicious or virtuous circle. Continued destruction of forests and huge emissions from cattle and other intensive farming practices will intensify the climate crisis, making the impacts on land still worse.

What came through for me in reading those four paragraphs was how bland the message. It's almost as sterile as the soil itself and it's from The Guardian!  I know, ask George. Monbiot calls this report a miserable failure.

The problem is that it concentrates on just one of the two ways of counting the carbon costs of farming. The first way – the IPCC’s approach – could be described as farming’s current account. How much greenhouse gas does driving tractors, spreading fertiliser and raising livestock produce every year? According to the panel’s report, the answer is around 23% of the planet-heating gases we currently produce. But this fails miserably to capture the overall impact of food production.

The second accounting method is more important. This could be described as the capital account: how does farming compare to the natural ecosystems that would otherwise have occupied the land? A paper published in Nature last year, but not mentioned by the IPCC, sought to count this cost. Please read these figures carefully. They could change your life.

The official carbon footprint of people in the UK is 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person per year. But in addition to this, the Nature paper estimates that the total greenhouse gas cost – in terms of lost opportunities for storing carbon that the land would offer were it not being farmed – of an average northern European diet is 9 tonnes a year. In other words, if we counted the “carbon opportunity costs” of our diet, our total footprint would almost triple, to 14.4 tonnes.

Okay, well, I'm not sure we're ready to give up meat, poultry, even fish for a diet of swill and soya. I could be wrong but I just don't see it. Still, I like Monbiot's closer:

Are we prepared to act on what we know, or will we continue to gorge on the lives of our descendants?

But wait, there's more. We can avert the worst of the worst. All it will take is a little sacrifice.

However, action now to allow soils and forests to regenerate and store carbon, and to cut meat consumption by people and food waste, could play a big role in tackling the climate crisis, the report says.

Such moves would also improve human health, reduce poverty and tackle the huge losses of wildlife across the globe, the IPCC says.
Burning of fossil fuels should end as well to avoid “irreversible loss in land ecosystem services required for food, health and habitable settlements”, the report says. 

“This is a perfect storm,” said Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who was an expert reviewer for the IPCC report. 

“Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency. Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat.”

Didn't you just know that our fossil-fuel economy would get in there somehow?  We know we've got to shut it down but even our Eco-warrior prime minister has other plans. He wants to take us in exactly the opposite direction. Burn baby, burn.

Prof Jim Skea, from the IPPC, said the land was already struggling and climate change was adding to its burdens. Almost three-quarters of ice-free land was now directly affected by human activity, the report says. 

Poor land use is also behind almost a quarter of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions – the destruction of forests, huge cattle herds and overuse of chemical fertilisers being key factors.

Emissions relating to fertilisers have risen ninefold since the early 1960s. Rising temperatures are causing deserts to spread, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the Americas and Mediterranean are at risk, the report says. 

One of the most stark conclusions in the IPCC report is that soil, upon which humanity is entirely dependent, is being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed in ploughed areas; and lost 10 to 20 times faster even on fields that are not tilled. 

The report recommends strong action from governments and business, including ending deforestation and enabling new forests to grow, reforming farming subsidies, supporting small farmers and breeding more resilient crops. Many of those solutions, however, would take decades to have an impact, the IPCC says.

Decades. We haven't got decades to turn this around. Not unless we act now to buy more time.  That could begin by at least exploring new economic models to replace our current three-pack-a-day neoliberalism with its impossible growth-centric focus. And shutting down fossil fuels as fast as possible would be a great help. That could begin by putting an abrupt end to high-carbon fossil energy, thermal coal and bitumen.

The key to all of these crises is quite simple. Mankind has to accept the mortal need to live within the sustainable limitations of our very finite planet, Earth. We're way beyond that now and we just want to grow bigger, faster, all the time. If we can't find and adopt ways to again live in harmony with this, our one and only biosphere, it will surely eliminate us. And that is suicide.