FT.com / Partnership Publishing - Growing concerns - The Diigo Meta page

• 13 Nov 08
  

  Nadine Touzet

  agriculture climate

  • Europe’s grocery basket
  • below-average rainfall
  • farmers across the world use 1.4bn hectares of land for crops – about 10 per cent of the total ice-free land – and another 2.5bn for pasture.
  • more than 200m hectares of arable land is under irrigation, using about 75 per cent of fresh water resources withdrawn from aquifers, lakes and rivers by human activity.
  • Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation: Challenges and Opportunities for Food Security
  • farming is responsible for 25 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, largely from deforestation; 50 per cent of methane emissions through rice and fermentation processes; and more than 75 per cent of nitrous oxides, mainly from fertiliser application, emitted annually by human activities.
  • Africa will suffer acutely, with predictions of a more than 30 per cent decline in cereal output by 2050.

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