5 ideas to fight climate change through better land use

Workers turn soil containing biochar in a corn field at the Villa Carmen Biological Station in Peru in December 2014. The addition of biochar can both store carbon in the soil and act as fertilizer. (Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters)

Climate change is a global challenge that has no borders and that to combat it requires coordinated work by all countries.

Certainly, there is a great ignorance of what climate change really is, either due to excess information, inaccuracy in the sources or due to disinformation, which gives rise to a series of false myths about climate change.

First of all, it is necessary to clarify two concepts that, although closely related, are often mistakenly taken as synonyms: climate change and global warming. There is an important difference, and that is that global warming is the cause of climate change, that is, the increase in the temperature of the planet caused by emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases derived from human activity, are causing variations in the weather that would not occur naturally.

It is time to combat climate change

The Earth has already warmed and cooled on other occasions naturally, but the truth is, that these cycles had always been much slower, needing millions of years, while now and as a consequence of human activity, we are reaching levels that at other times they brought extinctions in just two hundred years.

More sustainable food production and forestry could reduce emissions and store carbon. And it is that growing more crops in the shade of the forest, fertilizing crops with charcoal and using commercial policies to ensure that imported food is grown without damaging the landscapes and expanding deserts abroad are some of the ways we can combat climate change by using land more sustainably.

There is no doubt that climate change is putting additional pressure on forests, farmland and other landscapes that are already strained or threatened by human activities such as agriculture and forestry.

Therefore, it is really appropriate to bring up 5 ideas that are intended to help combat climate change through better land use:

1. Agroforestry
   
2. Biochar
   
3. Producing more wood
   
4. Think outside the plot
   
5. Sustainable sourcing

Read more.

Source: Emily Chung | CBC News