Certain trends and innovations that we can apply can not only improve conditions that we thought were almost irreversible. Similar to the recent bookmark I made about Plastics being recycled and how this would create a conglomerate bigger than Apple & Google combined. The information below I'm bookmarking courtesy of Tom:
Carbon Farming is a point of very high leverage to reverse climate change by taking one of the highest offenders of co2 release and turning it into a net sink while giving farmers a better chance in the market and strengthening local food economies:
Carbon farming is the broad term used for a suite of practices which aim to sequestor carbon from the atmosphere into either biomass or into soil. It is very important because agriculture is one of the leading causes of co2 emissions and therefore climate change. It is also a driver of climate change in that as trees and other perennial vegetation are removed from landscapes evaporation transportation is reduced, breaking the water cycle. Less water being transpired into the air means dryer climates, and greater temperature instability.
Many solutions to climate change are important and effective however this is a much higher leverage point than most because you are essentially taking a huge driver of climate change and not only stopping it, but reversing it. The models of how effective this could be in a relatively short amount of time to reduce the impacts of climate change are incredible(see the works of Paul Hawkins and Eric Toensmeir for numbers)
Within carbon farming there are many different practices however Agroforestry is proving to be one of the most effective, not only because it is essentially the incorporation of trees into landscapes which obviously helps solve the problems raised above but it also benefits farmers by helping them have a more diversifed production portfolio which can hedge against bad production years or market forces. In many cases it can help them shift away from commodities with very thin margins towards higher value crops that can be sold in more local and regional markets which helps the community over all.
Within agroforestry there is a specific practice called silvopasture which essentially means grazing animals under tree systems. When grazing animals are managed within a Holistic Planned Grazing Framework they can draw down and sequestor tremendous amounts of carbon in places that are not suitable for vegetable crop production (slopes, rocky areas, etc.) (see the work of Allan Savory/Savory Institute )and Holistic Management International.
