Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
et al.
, 2009; Harvey and Pilgrim, 2010). Agricultural and food systems are estimated
to account for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than twice that of
the transport sector (IPCC, 2007). Thus the goal of the agricultural sector is no longer
simply to maximize productivity, but to optimize across a far more complex land-
scape of production, rural development, environmental, and social justice outcomes
(IAASTD, 2009; Godfray
et al
., 2010; Sahs
et al
., 2010).
The complexity of drivers facing global agriculture has received growing recog-
nition (World Bank, 2007; Royal Society, 2009; National Researh Council, 2010).
However, there remain signiicant hallenges to developing national and interna-
tional policies that support the wider emergence of more sustainable forms of land
use and efficient agricultural production, across both industrialized and developing
countries (Prety, 2008). A recent analysis of the top 100 global questions for agri-
cultural and food systems (Prety
et al
., 2010) identiied a series of interloking and
framing hallenges for this century. hey demonstrate the closely tied socioecolo-
gical nature of agricultural and food systems, and show that solutions will have to
come from more than one sphere of political, tehnological and economic life:
• climate hange and water
• biodiversity and ecosystem services
• energy and resilience
• social capital and gender
• governance, power and policy making
• food supply hains
• consumption paterns.
Climate hange and water
Climate hange predictions point to a warmer world within the next 50 years, yet the
impact of rising temperatures on rainfall distribution paterns remains far less cer-
tain (IPCC, 2007). The situation for the oceans is equally serious, with coastal ocean
temperatures documented to be warming 3-5 times more rapidly than the projec-
tions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the capacity
of marine ecosystems to sequester one half of global carbon becoming impaired.
From a global food security perspective, many commercial fish species are becoming
economically extinct, with recent surveys showing 63 per cent of ish stoks glob-
ally needing intensive management toward rebuilding biomass and diversity due
