Carbon & Food Production
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
A three part series of articles explaining the United Nations change in climate warming predictions; the effects those changes will have on New Zealand’s agricultural industries and the impact that those changes will have on carbon sequestration and GHG emissions from agriculture.
Carbon footprint of New Zealand beef and lamb:
New research has confirmed the carbon footprint of New Zealand beef and lamb is amongst the lowest in the world. The comprehensive study has found that a kilo of New Zealand sheep meat has a carbon footprint of just under 15 kilograms of CO2 equivalent emissions per kilo, and that the carbon footprint of New Zealand beef is just under 22kgs – making the country’s red meat among the most efficient in the world.
Carbon Sequestration
There is currently, an increasing amount of interest in understanding how to recognise and encourage carbon sequestration on farmland with national data on net carbon sequestration by trees within farms equating to 29% of the total on-farm GHG emissions.
A recent report prepared by Auckland University of Technology, estimated woody vegetation on sheep and beef farms may be offsetting 63 to 118 per cent of the gross agricultural emissions from this sector (Case and Ryan, 2020).
Climate Change Proposals for Agriculture
New Zealand farmers have raised concerns about the current proposals to either adopt the He Waka Eke Noa proposals or to join the Emissions Trading Scheme. They have concerns that NZ Agriculture along with the NZ economy will be forced, through a pretty unrealistic ideology mind-set, to produce less food, more expensively.
Farmers don’t believe that the proposed options are fit for purpose, and will only add unnecessary cost to food production. The ‘pricing’ options are precedent setting leaving no way back from ideology driven demands.
Concern over the impacts of carbon farming
A recently released report details how vast tracts of farmland are being sold to carbon farming speculators, with a significant amount being bought up by offshore interests. They offset their greenhouse gas emissions by planting trees on productive sheep and beef farms. Much of the land is going into permanent forestry for carbon sequestering and this is destroying many rural communities and creating ghost towns.
The UN got it wrong and so did we
The UNFCCC declared in October 2022 that their predictions around climate change were in fact wrong and that they were reducing their predicted climate warming numbers by 50%.
Many of the government’s recent decisions have been impacted by their interpretation of the climate change scenarios using the worst case predictions which have now been debunked by the UN itself.
This madness must stop. We should all be challenging our politicians to explain why they and their legions of report writers are still using the discredited worst case scenario as the basis for modelling public policy in New Zealand.
All climate change policy should be suspended immediately while the modelling is redone using scenarios based on reality, not fantasy.