Farming Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis

Early tomorrow (this story was published August 7), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a new report that highlights the importance of land use and agriculture in climate change.

California cows, Marin County. 

Good! It’s a crucial area for us to focus on, and it’s often neglected.

I’ve been working on this topic, on and off, since the 1990s, and have been bewildered why it doesn’t get more attention. For some reason, when we think of greenhouse gas emissions, we envision factories, cars, and smokestacks — not farm fields, plantations, and cattle ranches. But, it turns out, land use and agriculture are among the biggest contributors to climate change — and can be among the biggest climate solutions.

So it’s great to see more attention paid to land use and agriculture, and its central role in addressing the climate crisis. At Project Drawdown, we have stressed this point since the beginning, and we are happy to see others talk about it too.

Read the story from Medium by Jonathan Foley - “Farming Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis.”