Session: Climate resilience in Ag
F: Keren
D: Kevin
Hope, Kevin, Tica, Alex, Paul, Ankita, Ned, Chris
What is bringing you to this space?
A: What are people doing in relation to ag to impact climate change? Are there places people are thinking about climate change? Clearly there are people focused on carbon sequestration or paying for mitigation. What are people doing in terms of adaptation?
How do we encourage / incentivize / reward people for their adaptation? Hope is that mitigation and adaptation can go hand-in-hand. For example, planting trees to take up carbon and to reduce erosion.
Interrogate the role of technology in adaptation.
Specifically for the Maine use case, some practices that have been well known (covering to extend seasons) are growing more common and there are some issues with scale.
If we can hold in mind a love of nature as we develop adaptation technologies, that will impact the quality of the outcomes.
Utopian vision around aligning fields with a natural ecosystems. To do this at scale, it has to be through some farm management tool. Looking at tools to support a more complex planting scheme.
Related to more complex planning - there is outcome planning. Resilience in face of known and unknown challenges - e.g. drought, changing planning dates, help identifying practices that need to change. E.g. water smart practices that need to be adopted in newly water scarce regions.
Themes:
What does climate resilience mean in the big picture? In specific practices?
Role of technology in climate resilient practices
Time is an important axis to think about. How can technology help on different temporal timelines, e.g. short-term, mid-term, long-term. In the climate resilience toolkit, they have some of these timelines and tools for each.
What should we try to accomplish in the next hour?
We could assess the toolkit and see if there are any gaps? Perhaps start with a few climate actions, e.g. coastal hazards, complex ag systems, managed retreat, etc. Ankita gave a few
Managed retreat (Responding to changing landscapes)
Indirect stakeholders will be impacted significantly too and supports for both direct and indirect participants. May need more guidance from central bodies about what needs to be grown.
Consumer experience in getting food
Food systems are large interconnected systems. Need to be able to bounce back from systemic shocks and support workers in those communities. What this will look like will depend heavily on where you are from urban gardens, replacing lawns with gardens, eating fish, etc.
Agronomic adaptation (Supporting farmers in becoming more climate resilient (e.g. new crops, new markets))
Stakeholders: Farmers, buyers, ecosystem. New diets fueled by interconnections. Mutual risk and responsibility between different players. RE: tech how comfortable are different players - do they trust it? Trust building will return dividends and state agencies may be the best holder of
For example, if potatoes are really hot one year but getting access to quality seed stock is difficult there may be barriers. The market incentivizes but doesn’t remove barriers.
Can we pick some key words to guide us in defining climate resilience?
Regenerating ecosystem function
Protection and adaptation (at various scales)
Successful responsiveness
Compassion
What about a crowdfunding platform to get a farmer to grow a new climate resilient food. Consumers can indicate interest and pre-pay for particular seed. When someone takes it, the pot goes to them.
Summary:
How are we adapting and what is the role of technology in adaptation. We can plan in terms of likely outcomes. Though climate change is a global issue, how individuals will be impacted both directly and indirectly will be very, very contextual.