New climate change report underscores the need to manage land for the short and long term: SciFiGeneration

In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes how agriculture, deforestation, and other human activities have altered 70% of the land on Earth’s surface. 

These changes are significantly adding to climate-warming emissions. They are also making forests and other natural systems, which can store key greenhouse gases, less able to do so.
Many calls to limit emissions focus on those from energy and transportation. But as the IPCC report points out, agriculture and land use are also major greenhouse gas sources. In the past decade, land use was responsible for 22% of global greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 35% for energy and 14% for transportation.

For the past 20 years, I have been working to understand how severe climate change will be in the coming century. Scientists know that Earth’s climate responds to both changes in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and changes in land use. This report makes clear that solving the climate crisis will require serious choices about how humans interact with the land systems that provide our societies with food, water and shelter.

The story is not all doom and gloom. There are strategies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from land use, food production and agriculture, and also generate economic and social benefits. Acting on these recommendations would be a big step toward addressing climate change in a meaningful way. 

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