A Brave New World at Climate Talks

IATP's Anne Laure Constantin is reporting from the global climate talks in Poznan, Poland this week.

Agriculture is not a major topic in the current climate change negotiations (I will come back to this in an upcoming post). But in the corridors, many people are raising the issue of agriculture's vulnerability to climate change as a matter of emergency—all of them admitting there is no ready made solution. Yesterday, the International Federation of Agricultural Producers held its side event. Although the session was late, the room was packed.

The discussions were quite surprising. Although they were introduced by an organic dairy farmer from Sweden and kicked off by an intervention stressing the need to associate farmers with the development of knowledge on how to adapt to climate change, the rest of the session focused on the possible paths that biotechnology could open to limit greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. The most astonishing to me was the presentation by a representative of the New Zealand government: research institutions there are not really trying to reduce agricultural emissions due to livestock production, but rather to moderate their increase. And this means genetic manipulations, vaccinations, and other ideas to prevent cows from producing methane! Look just at the PowerPoint; the slides speak for themselves.

After this presentation, I felt like we would soon be living in a brave new world in the name of climate change mitigation!

Discussing this with colleagues here makes me realize more and more that the reality of the negotiations at the UNFCCC is based on hopes that science or market-based mechanisms are going to provide the answer to climate change. Talks about changing our energy-intensive production model are very marginal. Not a very encouraging sentiment.