Posted in Sustainable Land Management

Climate Change And The Sustainability of the Dairy industry

SUSTAINABILITY IN BUSINESSThere are a lot more problems with the dairy industry than the price of milk.

The Australian dairy farming industry is in a state of crisis. Cheap dairy products and fluctuations in both the domestic and global markets have taken a financial toll on farmers. Consumers have rallied to help struggling dairy producers.

But this is only half the problem. The true cost of dairy is also paid by dairy cows and the environment.

With the meat and dairy industries as the leading cause of global warming, in 2010, the UN announced that a global shift towards a plant-based diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change.

Despite the idyllic image of outdoor farming, several industry practices negatively affect dairy cows. To meet production demands, dairy cows are subject to a continuous cycle of impregnation, induced calving and milking. One of the most controversial issues is young “bobby” calves.

As well as systematic welfare problems, livestock farming is, both directly and indirectly, one of the most ecologically harmful human activities. The Australian livestock sector is worth A$17 billion and dairy cattle farming is a A$4.2 billion industry.

In Australia, livestock farming accounts for 10% to 16% of greenhouse gas emissions, with dairy farms contributing 19% of this, or 3% of total emissions. Methane emissions, from digestion and manure, and nitrous oxide from livestock are significant contributors. Globally, the livestock sector is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the world’s transport.

Livestock production accounts for 70% of all agricultural land, including the land used to grow crops to feed these animals. Animal agriculture is a key factor in land degradation, deforestation, water stress, pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

Livestock farming will also be affected by climate change, particularly changes in temperature and water. The quantity and quality of pasture and forage crops will also be affected. Diseases may increase due to fluctuating weather and climate.

Research shows that we must reduce food waste and losses in the supply chain and change our diets toward less resource-intensive diets, such as a plant-based diets. Doing so would cut emissions by two-thirds and save lives. It’s possible to eliminate animal suffering and reduce carbon emissions by reducing and replacing livestock production and consumption.

Alternatives to dairy milk include soy and almond milk. Soy milk is nutritionally comparable to dairy milk and has a significantly smaller environmental footprint.

Policy initiatives also need to address these issues. The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Livestock’s Long Shadow report recommends a policy approach that correctly prices natural resources to reflect the full environmental costs and to end damaging subsidies. In the interim, higher taxes on meat and other livestock products will be necessary to improve public health and combat climate change.

Denmark, for instance, is considering proposals raise the tax on meat, after its ethics council concluded that “climate change is an ethical problem”.

Governments everywhere need to have a transitional plan for livestock producers and workers – one that helps to cultivate the ethical and sustainable agricultural endeavours of the future.
To read more at the Conversation CLICK HERE.

World’s urban waste mountain remains a growing problem

The amount of rubbish generated by city dwellers is set to rise steeply in the next two decades, with much of the increase coming in fast-growing cities in developing countries, according to a World Bank report published on Wednesday.

The amount of municipal solid waste is growing fastest in China – which overtook the US as the world’s largest waste generator in 2004 – other parts of east Asia, and parts of eastern Europe and the Middle East, the report says. Growth rates for rubbish in these areas are similar to their rates for urbanisation and increases in GDP.

The report estimates the amount of municipal solid waste will rise from the current 1.3bn tonnes a year to 2.2bn by 2025. The annual cost of solid waste management is projected to rise from $205bn to $375bn, with cost increasing most sharply in poorer countries. The report’s authors point to a looming crisis in waste treatment as living standards rise and urban populations grow.

“Improving solid waste management, especially in the rapidly growing cities of low-income countries, is becoming a more and more urgent issue,” said Rachel Kyte, vice-president of sustainable development at the World Bank. “The findings of this report are sobering, but they also offer hope that once the extent of this issue is recognised, local and national leaders, as well as the international community, will mobilise to put in place programmes to reduce, reuse, recycle, or recover as much waste as possible before burning it (and recovering the energy) or otherwise disposing of it. Measuring the extent of the problem is a critical first step to resolving it.”

The report notes that municipal solid waste management is the most important service a city provides. In poorer countries, rubbish collection and processing is often the largest single budget item for cities, and one of the largest employers.

You might also like “Beijing buys a waste management company to solve its pollution problems—but it won’t work“… here

Warmer climate boosts northern crops but the bad soon outweighs the good

By Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation

Climate change is creating warmer growing conditions in parts of the Earth’s northern regions, a new study has found, but experts warn that drought and heat wil soon cancel out the agricultural benefits.

The international study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, analysed NASA satellite data and 30 years of land surface temperature records for 26 million square kilometres between the Arctic Ocean and 45 degrees north latitude.

“Higher northern latitudes are getting warmer, Arctic sea ice and the duration of snow cover are diminishing, the growing season is getting longer and plants are growing more,” Ranga Myneni of Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment, said in a media release on the NASA website.

“In the north’s Arctic and boreal areas, the characteristics of the seasons are changing, leading to great disruptions for plants and related ecosystems.”

Of the area studied, up to 41% had experienced increased plant growth since 1982.

While warming climate may boost crop conditions in some regions, it also increases the risk of drought, heatwaves and pest outbreaks, the study found.

Dr Daniel Rodriguez, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Plant Science said the results of the study accord with what climate change scientists have been saying for some time.

“The good news is that this study provides clear evidence on modelled results present in previous reports,” he said adding that the warmer conditions had boosted Denmark’s commercial wine industry and doubled grain yields in Finland.

“The bad news is that this confirms that climate change is happening very quickly, as expected, and that even though some regions are going to have increases in productivity (though nothing is said here about changes in variability), in other places we expect these changes to be highly detrimental to food production,” said Dr Rodriguez.

“In the same issue of Nature Climate Change other authors indicate that for North America’s maize production, strong negative yield responses to the accumulation of temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius could also be expected as a consequence of increased air dryness.”

Dr Andrew Ash, Director of the CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship, said the early stages of climate change could also lead to increased crop productivity in some parts of Australia.

“But then a combination of declining rainfall projected for the mid-latitudes of Australia and increasing temperatures will negatively impact crop growth. You can initially get some good news but ultimately it’s a negative,” he said.

Within a couple of decades, the benefits of warmer growing conditions and increased carbon dioxide concentrations would be quickly outweighed by declining rainfall and heat stress on grain quality, he said.

“The big unknown in all of this is other factors like pests, disease and fire. There are still a great many uncertainties around the effects of climate change but very few of the likely scenarios are positive for agriculture,” he said.

The Conversation

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

$11.5 million boost for Victoria’s recycling and resource recovery infrastructure

#susbiz

The Victorian Minister for Environment and Climate Change Ryan Smith

The Minister for Environment and Climate Change Ryan Smith is continuing to drive improvement in Victoria’s recycling efforts announcing an $11.5 million funding package to improve recycling infrastructure across the state.

It follows $13.8 million of infrastructure funding already announced this year as part of the Victorian Coalition Government’s Conserve Invest and Save strategy.

This latest funding package includes:
• $5 million for Round 2 of the Driving Investment in New Recycling (DINR) fund through grants and;
• $6.5 million for Resource Recovery Infrastructure (RRI) at landfills, which will target large scale projects.

“We are continuing our reinvestment of the landfill levy back into the waste management industry to improve our capacity to sort and recover resources that would otherwise be sent to landfill,” Mr Smith said.

“This new funding package will help construct new facilities and upgrade existing infrastructure that makes sorting our waste at landfills or resource recovery centres more effective.

“Funding will be available to local government, private industry, waste management groups and non-profit organisations working in recovery and recycling,” Mr Smith said.

“We want to retrieve more material from the municipal waste stream and we want to help recover and process more of the commercial and industrial waste, such as cardboard, metals, plastics, glass and timber that is going to waste in our landfills.

“The waste system was an undervalued part of the Victorian economy under the former Labor government. The Coalition Government is proud to support the sector’s development which will have tangible environmental benefits.”

The programs will be offered through a two-stage assessment process, an Expression of Interest (EOI) phase followed by a detailed application from successful EOI applicants. The phase one EOI will be open for application in late July 2012.

The Delbessie Agreement – A Framework For Sustainable Land Management

The Delbessie Agreement – a framework for sustainable land management Robert Hassett*, Prue Peart*, Greg Coonan* *Department of Environment and Resource Management, Brisbane, Qld 4001.

 The Delbessie Agreement (or State Rural Leasehold Land Strategy) is a framework for the sustainable management of state rural leasehold land. Developed and implemented by Queensland’s Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM), the Agreement represents a groundbreaking partnership between the Queensland Government, AgForce, and the Australian Rainforest Conservation Society.

It is a contemporary plan for sustainable use, protection and rehabilitation of rural leasehold land that takes aspirations of leaseholders, conservation and Indigenous groups, government agencies and rural industry into account. The Agreement uses a mix of incentives and regulatory approaches to support profitable and productive primary industry, while meeting natural resource management challenges. It applies to approximately 1800 rural leasehold land leases issued for grazing and agricultural purposes covering about 86.6M ha (or about 50% of Queensland’s land area). The Agreement links the maintenance of land condition; the protection of conservation values (such as through the establishment of nature refuges) and Indigenous access; to extended lease terms.

A suite of practical measures and guidelines have been developed to support the implementation of the Delbessie Agreement. These include the Guidelines for determining lease land condition – designed around the eight elements of the Land Act 1994 ‘duty of care’ and defined elements of land degradation; and a Land Management Agreement – negotiated between the leaseholder and DERM that clearly outlines leaseholders’ natural resource management obligations for the ongoing sustainable management of lease land. The framework is further supported by practical policies, leading remote sensing and modelling tools, and purpose-built IT applications. Developing partnerships, capacity building and enhancing the knowledge of the stewards of rural leasehold land condition is critical to meeting the Agreements’ social, environmental and economic objectives – improving the profitability, productivity and sustainability of rural leasehold land to assure the ongoing economic viability of rural communities.

Mr Robert Hassett – Department of Environment and Resource Management

Mr Prue Peart Principal Advisor (Resource Condition) Department of Environment and Resource Management

Mr Greg Coonan Director, State Land Asset Management Department of Environment and Resource Management

“Taking Care of Business: Sustainable Transformation” The Conference  15th & 16th September  – Radisson Resort, Gold Coast, Australia