{"id":1114,"date":"2015-09-29T17:25:49","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T17:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iccinet.org\/?p=1114"},"modified":"2015-11-28T23:53:51","modified_gmt":"2015-11-28T23:53:51","slug":"september-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/september-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"2015\u5e749\u6708"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fire in the Fields \u2013 \u201cBurning\u201d the Cryosphere<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOpen burning\u201d refers to a common agricultural practice found today throughout the world: the regular and periodic burning of lands, supposedly cheaply and quickly to remove excess vegetation.\u00a0 This may be crop residue such as straw, weeds, lands to be cleared, or in forestry understory prior to lumbar harvest. \u00a0In contrast to popular belief however, it is hardly a traditional practice \u2013 the Inca and Aymara never burned, and indeed some sources indicate burning was punishable by death because it damaged the \u201clifeblood of the soil.\u201d\u00a0 In the Himalayan region, straw was seen as a valuable resource \u2013 used for animal bedding, fuel for cookstoves or simply mulch on the fields.\u00a0 Nor is modern technology necessarily to blame \u2013 only in very recent years has burning begun in Nepal in response to new combines that cut straw much higher than the old ones \u2013 so high it was difficult to gather.<\/p>\n

City dwellers tend to think burning enriches the soil.\u00a0 Farmers see burning as a “quick and cheap” tool for clearing fields,\u00a0and many people today now believe burning enriches the soil by leaving ash. In reality, however, while certainly \u201cquick,\u201d open burning is not really \u201ccheap\u201d at all:\u00a0 it acutely damages soil by destroying the humus and soil structure vital to good production (the Incas had it right!).\u00a0 With each successive burn, soils become less fertile and water retentive and more prone to erosion, increasing the need for fertilizer, irrigation and run-off systems. \u00a0Agriculture-motivated set fires also often spread to surrounding fields and forests: in most nations, a majority of so-called \u201cwildfires\u201d originate with the practice, and several studies (including ICCI\u2019s 2013 On<\/em> Thin Ice<\/em> report with the World Bank) indicate that countries who have changed to no-burn practices (see below) decrease their overall amount of fires by 80-90%.<\/p>\n

Only recently have experts also begun to appreciate the damage caused by open burning as an accelerant for climate change, especially near delicate cryosphere zones; where deposited black carbon speed warming and melting of glaciers and snowpack already impacted by the global rise in temperatures from CO2 emissions.<\/p>\n

Farmers however lack the tools and knowledge to adopt alternatives.\u00a0 Nevertheless, cost-effective ones abound: chiefly Conservation Agriculture (CA), use of straw for fuel, or simply \u201clow-till\u201d practices that incorporate straw into the earth to enrich the soil, ultimately increasing yields and profits.\u00a0 Although such alternative practices are spreading rapidly, especially in the Americas and Europe, this lack of tools and resistance to the perceived economic risk of change allows burning to continue, accelerating snowpack and glacial melt, threatening water supplies already under pressure from climate change.<\/p>\n

The Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) seeks to reduce harmful short-lived climate pollutants from a variety of sectors, with an Agricultural Initiative that includes methane from livestock and rice paddies, as well as black carbon from open burning.\u00a0 ICCI\u2019s work under the Open Burning Component seeks to demonstrate at the local level that changed agricultural practices are feasible; and can successfully reduce both climate warming and health-damaging emissions, while at the same time increasing soil fertility and water retention. In a changing climate, no-burn practices are ideal to improve soil fertility and crop yields, providing adaptation benefits during more frequent weather extremes of both drought, and heavy rains. In addition, FAO and UNEP have identified CA as a primary means to meet the two-degree goal, with a consensus that these methods fix more soil carbon than traditional plowing methods.<\/p>\n

ICCI\u2019s recently released report, \u201cFire in the Fields:<\/strong> Moving Beyond the Damage of Open Agricultural Burning on Communities, Soil, and the Cryosphere,\u201d <\/strong>summarizes what has been learned from the CCAC-supported work on open burning in the Andes and Himalayas, through an 18-month project scoping the scale of the problem in these two regions:\u00a0 the \u201cwhat, who, when, where and why\u201d of open burning; identifying the major alternatives applicable to each region; and suggesting some low-hanging fruit \u201ccatalyst\u201d projects to begin the process of change that may be supported by bilateral donors, private sector foundations, multi-lateral development banks or the CCAC itself. These include \u201cshovel-ready\u201d programs that can lead to increased awareness among farmers, public sector officials and other stakeholders of the dangers of open burning; and more rapid, widespread adoption of these affordable and sustainable better agricultural practices.<\/p>\n

Rapid change is demonstrably possible.\u00a0 With sustained effort and good political will, open burning can and will become an exception, bringing the practice of agriculture full circle to earlier sustainable, truly traditional no-burn practices: making open burning once again an unthinkable crime against the \u201clifeblood of the soil.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fire in the Fields \u2013 \u201cBurning\u201d the Cryosphere \u201cOpen burning\u201d refers to a common agricultural practice found today throughout the world: the regular and periodic burning of lands, supposedly cheaply and quickly to remove excess vegetation.\u00a0 This may be crop residue such as straw, weeds, lands to be cleared, or in forestry understory prior to […]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ice-blog"],"modified_by":"admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1116,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions\/1116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}