Will the desert finally reveal that proven solutions are not a mirage?
Editor’s Note: This is the latest in our ongoing series of on-site reports from the UN Conferences of the Parties on climate, biodiversity and, in this case, desertification by our contributor Hunter Lovins. The current United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) or COP16, runs through Dec. 13 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. – Barclay Palmer
On the endless flight from Baku two weeks ago, it was impossible not to ask, “What the heck now?”
The recent climate COP in Azerbaijan, COP29, of course, was a “success.” It issued a triumphant Baku Accord, trumpeting the finalization of a global carbon market between countries (Article 6.2 for you geeks out there) and a voluntary market (6.4). And an agreement that countries from the Global North promise (really we do…) to find $300 billion to help Most of the World deal with the ravages of the climate crisis that they have had essentially nothing to do with creating.
Dust off the hands, hoist a drink and celebrate another in the 30-year string of successful failures.
What?
Thirty years ago, at the Rio Earth Summit, the world’s nations created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (and also on Biodiversity and Desertification) and began holding Conferences of the Parties, aka COPs, every year (every two years for biodiversity and desertification) to negotiate various agreements promising to hold global warming emissions to below the level that will cause damage to the earth and its people. Now every year, the climate COP celebrates its most recent success, and ignores that in those 30 years emissions have doubled and now threaten us all.
Oops.
“The amount was peanuts”
Somewhere nearing Istanbul, reality sets in. Yes, $300 billion is a lot of money. Until you realize that the North “promised” money it’ll never deliver. Even as the gavel fell on the “agreement,” activists and governments from the Global South, from India to Nigeria, protested, saying that the amount was peanuts, and comprised mostly of loans to be made to countries already crushed by debt.
Desertification is one of the drivers of climate change, and climate change, along with unsustainable agriculture, is certainly driving desertification.
And they are right.
The real cost to implement the renewable energy and regenerative agriculture that could solve the climate crisis will be at least $1.3 trillion a year, not counting payment for past and future damages, which would take it to more than $4 trillion. And keep in mind that globally, the spend on weapons in 2023 was $2.44 trillion!
As reality set in around the world, developing countries threatened restrictions on minerals that they will never be organized enough to impose, and cannot afford not to sell.
Fadhel Kaboub, senior adviser at Power Shift Africa, pointed out that, adjusted for a 5% inflation rate, by 2035 the new deal called the “Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) would amount to $175bn in today’s terms. This barely exceeds the $163bn debt service costs that African nations collectively face this year alone.
This may be the COP for real solutions
What now?
As I write, I’m on a red-eye flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the site of the next COP: COP16 of the Desertification Framework. The Biodiversity COP16 had failed a month ago when negotiations in Cali, Colombia ended without a conclusion because delegates from developing nations had to run for their planes home before the Presidency thought to gavel through an “agreement.” It will reconvene… at some point.
Why am I beating my body to a pulp?
Because, I hope, this may be the COP to actually put in place some real solutions. Desertification is one of the drivers of climate change, and climate change, along with unsustainable agriculture, is certainly driving desertification. One of the major solutions to both is regenerative agriculture.
The world’s 200 million pastoralists may be the real climate heroes.
Some rough numbers: Rodale Institute calculated that if we used compost-based, organic vegetable production, it could absorb on an annual basis all of the anthropogenic carbon emissions.
The other half of the regen ag solution is holistic grazing. The best comprehensive study of the importance of grazing to sequester carbon in the soil is by Professor Greg Retallack. Some 60 million years ago, the earth was at 1,000 parts per million concentration of CO2. When humans evolved, it was at 280 ppm.
Where’d the carbon go? Retallack shows that it went into the soil, driven by the co-evolution of grazing animals (which appeared about 30 million years ago).
This is why the Great Plains of the US had 10 feet of thick, nutrient-rich, black soil when the pioneers first came across it. That black is carbon; an “existence proof” that massive amounts of carbon can durably be sequestered 3 meters deep under a regime of grazing of prairie grass – far deeper than most university studies measure because they go by the shallower depths used by conventional agriculture.
Holistic grazing could sequester all man-made carbon
A back of the envelope calculation by scientists at Tufts University shows that using holistic grazing on ALL the world’s grasslands could return the earth to ~300 ppm within 60 to 100 years – sequestering the entire amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by our modern industrial economy, and slowing or even stopping our exacerbation of climate change.
How?
Dr. Richard Teague estimated that North America alone could sequester 0.8 billion tons of carbon per year just by using holistic grazing . He did not make a global estimate, but his calculations showed a rate of 1.2 tons of carbon removal per acre per year. At 52.5 million square kilometers, the world’s grasslands cover 54% of the earth’s land surface. The world’s 200 million pastoralists may be the real climate heroes. Other peer-reviewed studies confirm that annual carbon removal rate.
About 10 billion acres of grasslands have been degraded, including about half the world’s natural pasture land. If all of them were in regenerative grazing, a global reduction potential of 10 gigatons per year from this process is a justifiable forecast. Not all such land would be put to this use, nor would all land get the same carbon removal rate. But through regenerative grazing, organic crop production, reforestation, and best land use practices, the terrestrial biosphere could sequester the totality of our current emissions.
And, when you put carbon in the soil, you dramatically increase the water-holding capacity of that soil, helping to deal with the now common floods.
Maybe the land of deserts can bring the solutions humanity so desperately needs.
Let’s be clear: advocating regenerative grazing is not a pro-meat argument. That’s a completely separate debate. Don’t get distracted.
The point is that a combination of two strategies could actually solve the climate crisis – and at a profit: If we CUT current emissions through renewable energy (now everywhere cheaper than fossil energy), then remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere by organic farming and holistic grazing, we can roll back climate change while stabilizing and boosting the world economy.
Oh, and it also helps solve the desertification crisis, the migration crisis, the food security crisis, the political crisis…. and it helps protect national security, too.
My goal: bring these numbers to the people seeking to solve desertification. If COP 16 in Baku is the predictable disappointment. Maybe the land of deserts can bring the solutions humanity so desperately needs.
