If managed grazing could be amped up worldwide, it could sequester over 16 gigatons of carbon by 2050.
Climate change and/or global warming are familiar catch-cries of this decade, so much so it was yet again, an election issue.
What most of us don’t understand is what is really causing it, and how we can do our bit.
As Alan Jones reiterated on election night, Australia accounts for 1.3% of C emissions globally and the problematic issue is the 3.4% increase in the 0.04% of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is presumably why the Government doesn’t take it seriously. While this seems trivial, and it is, it is indicative of a much bigger issue – the serious man-made disruption to the balance of nature that maintains the health of the planet. And since we have caused it, we must fix it.
Lack of global engagement in dealing with this is, I believe, the over-emphasis on carbon emissions at the expense of other major contributors.
The changes are tiny, and every attempt to prove they are the marker for imminent doom has failed. The following diagram might help put this into perspective.
The real importance of carbon is that as individuals we can take some responsibility, but globally, the crumbling diversity of species across the planet is a much more serious issue. We are only a breath away from catastrophic collapse of ecosystems across significant portions of the globe.
The diagram, published in Nature, clearly shows nitrogen as the second major distortion to the natural balance of the earth. Together with carbon, Nitrogen represents a transfer of inaction elements into active and reactive ones. We know about carbon dioxide and methane, but we know
much less about the potent active and reactive forms of nitrogen, particularly nitrous oxide, nitric acid and ammonia. It has been bang on a century since the commercial production of urea –originally for munitions, and post –war as an agricultural fertilizer – began to corrupt the nitrogen
balance of earth.
The key to reversing man’s impact on earth is to actively set about returning carbon to the ground and reactive N into nitrogen gas. Farming is the solution to this! In a sense, jungle, forest and bush has made way for farming in response to increased urbanization. Once the land is cleared, the
C and N cycles are reversed – they stop consuming CO2 and several reactive N species, and mobilize that stored in the soil. It’s a double whammy!
Remember most jungle, forest and bush is a stable ecosystem so has maxed out its global healing potential well before being cleared. The amazing thing is, that a productive pasture will out-consume both C and N compared to a forest, and do so on an almost endless basis as a renewable food source for livestock. Well managed pastures consume C and reactive-N in their tissues, but also bury a lot of both elements as inert materials in the soil (this is called “carbon drawdown”).
This, along with protecting and improving diversity, are the motives of the regenerative farming movement. And you will be very surprised at how little of the globe’s current farming land needs to be regenerated through pastures to rectify humanity’s contribution to global warming and climate
change.
FARMERS CAN, AND MUST, PROVIDE THE ONLY GENUINE SOLUTION TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS.
Dr Les Sandles- Written for the Weekly Times.