Climate news and knowledge #17

Climate News and Knowledge is our fortnightly round up of some of the main stories covering climate change and sustainable farming. This time there is talk of the power of the people, the fallout from the FIT review and climate change winners and losers.

Campaign year?

From North Africa to middle England, 2011 has been buffeted with some storm force like gusts of public opinion. Just in the last few months the ‘Save our forests’, ‘Hugh’s fish fight’ and ‘Not in my cuppa’ campaigns have created a stir and they all have one thing in common – food, agriculture and farmers. The ’Not in my cuppa’ campaign was partly responsible for the demise of the Nocton dairy, and is a good lesson in how people power and communications can be used to change things. 

Such campaigns show us that this is a generation that cares more about where its food comes from than any before. And farmers can learn from these campaigns. Farmers have plenty of issues of their own – bTB and farm gate prices being two of the biggest right now, and the industry could go much further in promoting a more positive and honest image of agriculture. 

If there’s ever been a wakeup call to make use of the power of collective agency in farming, the Nocton dairy campaign is it. And we have an opportunity next week. Pig farmers will be gathering in central London next week to demonstrate over the crisis the industry is facing in the wake of spiraling feed prices. Whatever you think of ‘pig anthems’ such as ‘Twist & Snout’, pig farmers should consider this a fresh opportunity to prove the industry’s credentials. Perhaps hire some young farming rap stars and make a TV commercial, who knows?

FIT Fallout...

Nine steady months, that’s all we got after the announcement of the Feed-in Tariffs last April before the Coalition Government weighed in again this month to announce a review. And it’s all because they are worrying about a so-called solar ‘Gold Rush’ – the FIT being swallowed up by large, field-scale solar arrays. But thankfully, Ofgem figures have put this into perspective: £6.3m is all the Government has forked out so far from this year’s FIT budget of £30m (which in itself was reduced from £51m). The FIT has triggered all sorts of other ‘gold rushes’ too, such as the race for the hills in Scotland to build small scale hydro schemes.

And the announcement of the review seems to have diverted interest back into other renewable, technologies – Fisher German’s Mark Newton reports that they’re receiving more calls about wind. The FIT is stimulating renewable energy And the Government suggests a new approach to getting wind farms into local communities – bribery! 

Find out more about the FIT review here.

Winners and losers

A recent study by the ‘Joint Research Centre’ in Spain has come up with a rather ambiguous conclusion that across Europe, climate change will bring both ‘winners and losers’. Quite obvious really, but the smart thinking really kicks home through the examination of how this affects trade across different industries and regions. No surprises that agriculture shows the greatest variation, with yield losses of 25% in southern Europe, but gains of up to 50% in Northern Europe. While this might seem like good news for some, the study shows that through the overall symmetry of impacts across the region, there will be an annual welfare loss (what does welfare loss mean? Think we need to make that clearer) of up to 1% per year. This may not seem like much, but given average annual growth in EU welfare is about 2%, the reversing of this trend could be quite something!

Note:

Unfortunately this will be my last post here (unless a minor miracle happens) as I am moving on from Farming Futures to torment the nations farmer’s from a different perspective – Farmers Weekly. I will however continue hording interesting stories and articles http://bit.ly/bundles/willfrazer/1 ">here if you’re interested.