Today, small farmers in rural Latin America live year to year, in hopes that weather and food prices remain good. But what if climate disasters – like droughts or floods – were to happen year after year? Walter Baethgen works in Latin America with Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
Walter Baethgen: If you can imagine a climate scenario in which those disaster years become more frequent, that means the farmers will have a very tough time establishing production systems which are stable enough for them to be able to live from.
Many scientists predict that global warming will lead to greater variability in climate. Baethgen told EarthSky that this variability could especially threaten the livelihoods of small farmers like those in Latin America, who are already struggling. Baethgen’s job is to help these farmers start preparing, now.
Walter Baethgen: Everything we do today to help those societies be better adapted to the droughts, to the floods, that they confront today will make those same societies less vulnerable to future climate conditions.
He added that if farmers can’t produce enough food to feed their families, they could become undernourished, or migrate into urban slums. Baethgen believes the first steps to creating stability for Latin America’s farmers are diversifying crops, establishing irrigation systems, and offering cheap agricultural insurance.
Walter Baethgen: I think there is a lot of room to improve the way the agriculture production system works today.
Dr. Baethgen explained how climate change could make small farmers’ livelihoods more vulnerable:
Walter Baethgen: If you’re used to producing let’s say, corn in one environment. Once in 50 years rainfall is lower than normal, you will be able to adjust your production system. That is not a big problem. The big problem is if you get more frequent droughts. If you have one dry year, every 10 or 15 years, you may be used to that. But if you get one dry year every 5 years, now your production system will really suffer.
He talked about the implications of these weather extremes:
Walter Baethgen: The most difficult challenge linked to climate change is changes in variability – changes in the frequency of very unfavorable years. That is what results in hurting stability of production and the income of the farmers a lot more than slow, gradual changes.
Our thanks to:
Walter E. Baethgen is the Director of the Program for Latin America and the Caribbean in the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society at Columbia University. At the IRI, he has been establishing regional research programs that aim to improve climate risk assessment and risk management in the agricultural, health, water resources and disasters sectors. Since 1990, Baethgen has been establishing and coordinating regional research programs in Latin America in collaboration with National and International organizations.
Dear Walter Baethgen,
Some day soon, I hope you and other splendid scientists will find adequate ways to directly acknowledge the global challenges of our times by helping us “connect the dots” between human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities on one hand and climate destabilization, natural resource dissipation and and environmental degradation on the other.
It seems to me that any “truth” about Earth’s ecology and climate science need to be coupled with the best available science about human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of our planetary home.
When the moment of ‘throwing out life preservers’ occurs, it will probably be too late for human action to do anything meaningful about the human-forced global threats that once loomed ominously before the human family. Time will have been wasted. We will have been fiddlin’ while Earth’s environs were destroyed for human habitation and its resources were being recklessly depleted. Father Greed will have effectively ravaged Mother Nature. Although global threats had called out to leaders for global interventions, there were no transformational leaders (except Barack Obama) and international institutions (including the United Nations) empowered with adequate authority to promote necessary change.
At bottom, while there was still time to make a difference, many too many leading environmentalists, politicians, economic powerbrokers, talking heads in the mass media and other public opinion shapers colluded in stony silence and did not speak out loudly and clearly about the colossal threat that is posed to the family of humanity by the gigantic scale and skyrocketing growth of human population numbers now overspreading the surface of Earth.
Threats to human wellbeing and environmental health cannot be reasonably addressed and sensibly overcome until the root causes of the threats are acknowledged, validated by science, and widely shared in the human community, I suppose.
Very best regards,
Steve