SPRING 2010 Climate Alert
Moving Beyond the Status Quo [ PDF ]
In this Newsletter:
Grasslands, Ranchers and Pastoralists Provide Significant Win-Win to Address Global Climate Change
Shannon A. Horst
Amid the numerous solutions to sinking more carbon while providing real benefits to humans, few are as significant as the potential of the world’s grasslands and the people who live on and manage them.
Grasslands, including rangelands, pasture, arid, semi-arid and tropical, represent 70 percent of the earth’s surface (11 billion acres) and its agricultural lands. The soils under these lands represent, conservatively, 20% of the world’s soil carbon stocks. An estimated 1 billion of the world’s rural poor live on these lands and are livestock keepers. These lands also provide wildlife habitat and water storage (in aquifers) and are the watershed catchments of many of the world’s major and minor rivers.
Over thousands of years, these grassland environments have lost significant biological diversity, resulting in desertification and soil carbon loss – thus, releasing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. This has been almost entirely a result of human disruption/management of these landscapes. But this deterioration can be reversed. The key is to change the way humans manage their domestic animals.
If grasslands were successfully managed and the deterioration were reversed on a significant scale, the world would see the following results:
• Significant carbon stocks sequestered in soils under the grasslands;
• Increased food and income security for pastoralists and agropastoralists;
• Reduced drought and flooding (as soils become healthy again);
• Reduced conflict over resources (think Horn of Africa);
• Improved rural economies in grassland regions;
• Restoration of freshwater river systems;
• Aquifers being replenished; and
• Improved wildlife habitat.
To achieve these results does not require huge sums of money spent on speculative research (like other solutions currently touted for reversing climate change). It requires only two things:
• Policymakers and climate change leaders taking grasslands seriously and supporting grazing management that uses livestock as a tool to reverse desertification; and
• Teaching ranchers, pastoralists and agro-pastoralists a better way to manage their animals.
For more than 30 years, Holistic Planned Grazing (developed by Zimbabwean Allan Savory) has helped families and pastoral communities reverse the loss of biological diversity and soil organic matter. It has also increased their productivity, resulting in stocking rates double the average while producing increased forage for wildlife as well. On June 2nd, the Buckminster Fuller foundation recognized Savory for his 50 years of work in developing this approach to improved grazing management as “a solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems.” It is the most effective approach to improved grazing and has been used and taught in both commercial and pastoral settings.
Holistic Planned Grazing is based on the fundamental principle that grasslands, their soils, grazing animals and the pack-hunting predator co-evolved. Thus, it is designed to simulate, with livestock, the symbiotic relationship between soils, plants and animals. Overgrazing is not caused by too many animals, but by the time that plants are exposed to the animals or re-exposed after an initial grazing. Holistic Planned Grazing ensures that grasses (and other plants) have adequate time for recovery (to put up leaf and build root) and it works to create animal impact, which is crucial to the health of the soils, preparing the land for seeds, setting the seeds (under the hooves) and water infiltration. It is not a rotational grazing system but rather a planning, implementing, monitoring and replanning procedure that is used today by sophisticated commercial ranchers as well as by native herders in Zimbabwe.
According to the IPCC, improving grazing management and reversing grassland deterioration offer the most important technical mitigation solutions in agriculture.
Improved grazing management can lead to an increase, conservatively, in soil carbon stocks by an average of 0.35 t C ha-1 yr-1, but under good climate and soil conditions improved pasture and silvopastoral systems can sequester 1-3 t C ha-1 yr-1. Some scientists working on this and measuring soils in pastures already under Holistic Planned Grazing have indicated it can produce more. Sources indicate that it is estimated that 5-10 percent of global grazing lands could be placed under carbon sequestration management by 2020. But, with sufficient political will and funding support, far more could be placed under improved grazing management by today. This is a faster, less costly and more effective approach to reducing the legacy load than any other approach currently being explored or promoted. And, it is a win-win.
More information about Holistic Planned Grazing:
Operation Hope: Permanent water and food security for Africa's impoverished millions
Allan Savory's
Feasta Lecture at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
- Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis?
Other Articles in this Newsletter:
Healthy People, Healthy Planet
Twenty Years After Valdez: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
Christiana Figueres Named to Lead Climate Secretariat
Star Homes: Retrofitting American Housing
Mitigating Industrial Black Carbon Through Energy Recycling
Algaeoleum: Fueling the Future
Shore-Based Power: Reducing Idle Ships' Emissions
United States Regulatory Solutions for Reduction of Black Carbon Emissions