Benefits of Organic Agriculture as a Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Strategy in Developing Countries

Organic agriculture, as an adaptation strategy to climate change and variability, is a concrete and promising option for rural communities and has additional potential as a mitigation strategy. This article is a short review of this topic. Adaptation and mitigation based on organic agriculture can build on wellestablished practice because organic agriculture is a sustainable livelihood strategy with decades of use in several climate zones and under a wide range of specific local conditions. The financial requirements of organic agriculture as an adaptation or mitigation strategy are low. Further research is needed on yields in organic agriculture and its mitigation and sequestration potential. Other critical points are information provision and institutional structures such as market access

Comment on "Searchinger et al. (2018), Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change (Nature 564: 249)"

Some days ago, the article from Searchinger et al. 2018 has been published and caused quite some discussion in the media, basically being reported to show that organic agriculture is bad for the climate. In the following, Adrian Müller (FiBL) present some fastly written compilation of thoughts on this article and this claim from the media that reported on it

Finding Groups in Large Data Sets

This paper aims to give an overview of methods to find groups in large data sets, such as household expenditure survey data. These methods are grouped in three: cluster analysis, dimension reduction and basic explorative methods. The emphasis is put on a critical analysis and potential drawbacks, especially of inputs that have to be provided by the researcher. These may impose some structure not present in the data, thus defeating the purpose of revealing intrinsic patterns. In general, the more elaborate methods, such as cluster analysis, are delicate to apply, especially in the context of social sciences. Often, it may be best to limit oneself to more transparent approaches such as comparisons of basic statistics.

Clarifying Poverty Decomposition

I discuss how poverty decomposition methods relate to integral approximation, which ultimately is the foundation of every decomposition of the temporal change of a quantity into key drivers. This offers a common framework for the different decomposition methods used in the literature, clarifies their often somewhat unclear theoretical underpinning and identifies the methods shortcomings. In light of integral approximation, many methods actually lack a sound theoretical basis and they usually have an ad-hoc character in assigning the residual terms to the different key effects. I illustrate these claims for the Shapley-value decomposition and methods related to the Datt-Ravaillon approach and point out difficulties in axiomatic approaches to poverty decomposition. Recent developments in energy and pollutant decomposition offer some improved methods, but ultimately, a further development of poverty decomposition should account for the basis in integral approximation. --poverty analysis,poverty measures,decomposition,Shapley-value,inequality

Organic farming practices and climate change adaptation

The need to adapt to climate change is one of the main challenges facing the future of agriculture. Even if strong and effective mitigation measures were taken, even if greenhouse gas emissions dropped to zero immediately, the climate would continue to change for decades. This is why adaptation is necessary. If global warming can be kept to a moderate level, our need to adapt might primarily reflect gradual changes; but if temperatures rise sharply, adaptation measures will necessarily involve some fundamental transformations in agricultural production. Moreover, as the effects of climate change can vary greatly at local and regional levels, even moderate global warming can trigger fundamental changes in some places

Soil carbon sequestration in Switzerland - the DOK trial

Organic systems, by closing nutrient cycles and making more efficient use of local (on-farm) resources, can contribute to mitigating climate change1. This is due to the fact that certain farming practices result in storage of carbon (C) in the soil (sequestration), thereby effectively reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The DOK trial, a research project on the mitigation potential of Organic Agriculture has demonstrated this

Sit-and-Wait Strategies in Dynamic Visual Search

The role of memory in visual search has lately become a controversial issue. Horowitz and Wolfe (1998) observed that performance in a visual search task was little affected by whether the stimuli were static or randomly relocated every 111 ms. Because a memory-based mechanism, such as inhibition of return, would be of no use in the dynamic condition, Horowitz and Wolfe concluded that memory is likewise not involved in the static condition. However, Horowitz and Wolfe could not effectively rule out the possibility that observers adopted a different strategy in the dynamic condition than in the static condition. That is, in the dynamic condition observers may have attended to a subregion of the display and waited for the target to appear there (sit-and-wait strategy). This hypothesis is supported by experimental data showing that performance in their dynamic condition does not differ from performance in another dynamic condition in which observers are forced to adopt a sit-and-wait strategy by being presented with a limited region of the display only

Reducing Global Warming: The Potential of Organic Agriculture

For a successful outcome at COP 15 in Copenhagen in December, viable policy paths for effective climate change mitigation need to be provided. In addition, adaptation is unavoidable. One key point is the integration of agriculture (accounting for 10-12% of global emissions, Smith et al. 2007) in a post-2012 agreement. Its main potential lies in its significant capacity to sequester CO2 in soils, and in its synergies between mitigation and adaptation. This potential is best utilized employing sustainable agricultural practices such as organic agriculture (OA). Conservative estimates of the total mitigation potential of OA amount to 4.5-6.5 Gt CO2eq/yr (of ca. 50 Gt CO2eq total global greenhouse gas emissions). Depending on agricultural management practices, much higher amounts seem however possible. Organic agriculture complements emission reduction efforts with its major sequestration potential, which is based on the intensive humus production (requiring CO2) of the fertile soils. In comparison to conventional agriculture, OA also directly contributes to emission reductions as it emits less N2O from nitrogen application (due to lower nitrogen input), less N2O and CH4 from biomass waste burning (as burning is avoided), and requires less energy, mainly due to zero chemical fertilizer use. Its synergies between mitigation and adaptation also exert a positive influence. This in part due to the increased soil quality, which reduces vulnerability to drought periods, extreme precipitation events and waterlogging. In addition, the high diversity of crops and farming activities in organic agriculture, together with its lower input costs, reduce economic risks. OA has additional benefits beyond its direct relevance for mitigation and adaptation to climate change and climate variability, as it helps to increase food security and water protection. In the following, key points of organic agriculture are briefly listed, together with references for detailed information. The data refer to the annual potential of a global shift of agriculture to organic practices

Incentive Compatible Extraction of Natural Resource Rent

The exploitation of natural resources often generates considerable economic rent. Since such so-called resource rents accrue due to innate characteristics of the resource itself thus reflecting its eco-nomic value and not due to managerial abilities of the exploiting firm, at least part of it should - as a price for the use of the resource – be collected by the owner of the resource, which is often the gov-ernment. As the owner of the resource faces a classical principal-agent problem, the incentives to exploit a resource efficiently should be taken into account when setting up a rent extraction scheme. We pre-sent a formalism that unifies different existing approaches to such schemes and address issues such as asymmetric information, risk aversion, and uncertainty. Finally, we discuss the feasibility to base a rent extraction scheme on such a formalism and point out its main problems. The most important ones are the presence of intrinsically unobservable and very uncertain values and the high complexity of the formalism. There are mainly two possibilities to deal with these problems: either to make additional as-sumptions and to set boundary conditions such as to solve the problem in a simplified setting, as much of the literature does, or to refrain from solving it, and instead use it as a general guiding principle, which helps to avoid gross errors and shows the broad direction, but leaves the concrete implementa-tion rather to a political process than to an economic analysis.natural resource rent, incentives, rent extraction, regulation

Changing Agriculture in a Changing Climate

Changes in weather patterns are going to affect agriculture with impacts differing according to region. The developing countries can reckon with the first effects. The authors look at the role that organic agriculture can play in adaptation. They assess the potential that organic agriculture could have but also look at the contribution that agriculture itself is making to climate change and examine how organic agriculture fares in this respect