Cropped 19 April 2023: Fortress conservation; Ukraine aftershocks; India’s tiger census

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped. 
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

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Snapshot

A new study revealed that Indigenous territories that are officially recognised have less deforestation in Brazil’s Atlantic forests. However, concerns have been rising about whether the new biodiversity target to protect 30% of the land and 30% of the ocean by 2030 would affect Indigenous rights to their lands.

Ukrainian grains and food imports have been banned by Poland and Hungary, but the European Commission rejected the bans arguing that countries cannot take individual decisions. Meanwhile, hedge funds raked in nearly £1.5bn profit from trading grains and soya bean in the first few months of 2022.

India celebrated 50 years of Project Tiger and an uptick in big cat populations, but experts point out flaws in numbers and habitat loss. The country diverted about 89,000 hectares of forest land in the last five years, largely for road and mining projects.

Key developments

Land demarcation for forest conservation

DEMARCATION POWER: Territories in Brazil where land tenure has been formalised have lower deforestation rates and higher amounts of reforestation, Mongabay reported. According to a study that analysed changes in forest coverage in 129 Indigenous territories of Brazil’s Atlantic forests between 1995 and 2016, some regions recorded increases in forest cover of nearly 20% of the territory area. These sizable increases might be due to the fact that Indigenous communities can defend their territories more when they are sure that they will be protected by the federal government, which is “obliged by law to enforce the rights of the Indigenous territories,” a researcher told the outlet. Demarcation – which entails to officially register an area under Indigenous possession – came to a halt during the administration of the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. But “the new government, under [Brazilian president] Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has the opportunity to reverse this by abiding by the Constitution and granting Indigenous peoples their right to self-determination,” Mongabay noted.

IN THE NAME OF CONSERVATION: “Fortress” conservation – a model implemented to create protected areas with no human habitation – has displaced up to 250,000 people worldwide since 1990, Grist reported. The outlet explained that, once established, such protected areas force people to leave their homes and produce violence “at the hands of eco-guards”. It also illustrates how Indigenous peoples were killed “in the name of conservation”. For example, after Yosemite National Park was created in California in 1864, a “genocidal war against the Miwoks” occurred, and Indigenous peoples in the area decreased from 300,000 to 30,000. Protected areas currently comprise 16% of the Earth’s surface. But this is expected to nearly double by 2030 under the 30×30 target, agreed upon during the COP15 biodiversity summit last year. “Not enough assurances have been given so far to Indigenous peoples that their rights will be preserved in the process,” said José Francisco Calí Tzay, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

UN FORUM ON INDIGENOUS ISSUES: The conservation programmes that remove Indigenous peoples from their lands, and the number of Indigenous and land defenders that have been killed, are some of the concerns of Indigenous peoples and will be addressed at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which will take place on 17 April, Grist wrote in a separate piece. The meeting will be held in person for the first time in four years, at the UN headquarters in New York. It will discuss, among other things, the results of the report on Indigenous determinants of health, which “highlights factors that influence Indigenous health outcomes, including food systems,” the outlet said.

Ukraine grain imports ban 

BANNED IMPORTS: After increased supply led to price slumps, Poland and Hungary plan to ban imports of grain and other food commodities from Ukraine to protect their own agricultural sectors, Reuters reported. Russia’s invasion led to Ukrainian grains staying in central European states as a result of blocked Black Sea ports and “logistical bottlenecks”. This glut of supply ended up “hitting prices and sales for local farmers”. Prime ministers of five eastern European countries noted that the increase in products such as grains, oilseeds, eggs and poultry “had been unprecedented”, the newswire wrote. “The ban applies to grains, dairy products, sugar, fruit, vegetables and meats and will be in force until the end of June,” BBC News reported. It added that the EU Commission has rejected these bans on Ukrainian grain imports, saying that “it was not up to individual member states to make trade policy.” 

HEDGE FUNDS’ ROLE IN INFLATION: The Guardian reported that hedge funds have benefited from the food price spikes that occurred after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The outlet noted that the world’s 10 biggest hedge funds made nearly £1.5bn profit from trading grains and soya beans in the first quarter of 2022. The findings are part of an investigation led by Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative journalism unit, and the non-profit journalism organisation Lighthouse Reports. It has “raised fresh questions over the role of hedge funds and other speculators in inflating food prices,” the outlet wrote. Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, said that “hedge funds and financial speculators have made obscene profits by betting on hunger and exacerbating it” and warned that speculation in food commodities could affect vulnerable people. 

RE-OPENING FOOD TRANSIT: In response to the announcement of Poland and Hungary’s proposed bans on food and grain imports from Ukraine, Ukraine’s agriculture minister Mykola Solsky said that his country would secure the re-opening of food and grain transit via Poland “as a first step”, the Indian Express reported. “In terms of figures, everything that crossed the Polish border (from Ukraine)…is about 10% of everything (of food goods) Ukraine exported,” said Solsky, who explained that Hungary alone accounted for 6% of Ukrainian farm exports.

India’s food and forest woes

TIGER, TIGER: India celebrated 50 years of Project Tiger, a flagship conservation programme launched by Indira Gandhi in 1973 to revive dwindling big cat numbers, the Independent reported. Prime minister Narendra Modi, who went on safari to mark the occasion, announced that India’s tiger populations have increased from 2,967 in 2018 to 3,167 in 2022, the Times of India reported. However, in a comment in the Indian Express, wildlife historian Raza Kazmi pointed to “worrying trends” behind the absolute numbers. Kazmi writes that “tiger populations have completely collapsed across five east-central Indian states” and in north-east India, while the big cats are “either extinct, functionally extinct or teetering on the edge of extinction” in at least 15 tiger reserves. In the Hindu, conservation scientists observed that the population is at “more or less the same number”. They continued, saying that to celebrate this lack of improvement “despite strong political support, funds and the legal framework” since the programme began is “conservation amnesia”. They pointed out that the focus of the programme has “stayed on boosting tiger numbers rather than their habitat and concomitant species”. 

PARADISE LOST: India’s junior environment minister told the Indian parliament that in the last five years, his ministry approved the loss of 89,000 hectares of forest, mostly to roads and mining projects, the Hindustan Times reported. The minister admitted that Delhi’s residential and institutional green cover are being recorded as forests and will count towards India’s climate mitigation goals. Separately, the Hindustan Times reported that a tribal council had withdrawn its no-objection certificate for a “controversial” set of infrastructure projects in the Great Nicobar Islands that include an international container terminal, an international airport, a township and power plants, across what is currently 16,610 hectares of forestland. Council elders said in a letter that they were not made aware of the fact that about half of the land for this development would be taken from tribal reserve land. “After being moved to tsunami shelters, our lives have been very difficult and dependent on resources from outside,” they wrote. “We are originally completely dependent on forests and would want to go back to foraging and tending to plantations in our land.” To “compensate” for this forest loss, Indian authorities plan to build a safari park 2,400 kilometres away, near Delhi, Scroll.in reported.

A NEW DROUGHT: Vidarbha, a region in western India that has become synonymous with drought, indebtedness and farmer suicides, is facing a “new kind of drought”, People’s Archive of Rural India reported. Financially distressed farmers in coal- and forest-rich regions are now witnessing raids and killings by wild animals who cross over from the neighbouring tiger reserve. The outlet explained that “lush green fields with standing crops mean abundant fodder and feed for herbivores, carnivores lurk just around the corner”. Mining has also led to further forest fragmentation, with “tigers seen near coal mines or in the campus of the Chandrapur super thermal power station”. 

News and views

BIODIVERSITY ICON: Time magazine listed former UN Biodiversity chief Elizabeth Maruma Mrema as one of the world’s top 100 most influential people of 2023. The award recognises Mrema’s efforts at the COP15 biodiversity summit in December to shepherd countries towards “one of the decade’s biggest environmental wins”. She did so, the magazine continued, in spite of “vast differences” between the parties. It also recognised that her work is “far from over”. As deputy director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UN assistant secretary-general, Mrema now leads a taskforce on standardising how businesses disclose their impact on nature.

RISKY BUSINESS: Six major supermarket chains in Peru sell fruits and vegetables with high concentrations of pesticides that are not suitable for consumption, Salud con Lupa reported. The Latin American outlet carried out an investigation where they sent samples of eight kinds of fruits and vegetables to two certified laboratories in Lima for analysis. They found that 51 out of 84 samples of yellow chilli, celery, strawberry, beet, bell pepper, Chinese onion and tomato sold in those supermarkets had high concentrations of agrochemical residues with potential health hazards, exceeding the permissible limits. The outlet concluded that controls on quality standards “are not working properly”.

TOMATO TROUBLE: Rising energy and production costs – “up by about 30%” – have forced several farmers to halt their tomato production in the UK, the Guardian reported. It described farmers switching to “more lucrative crops” or even shuttering their greenhouses as a result of the rising costs of energy, labour, packaging and fertilisers. “The increase in prices…resulted in supermarkets having to limit purchases of items including tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers during a cold spell in southern Spain and north Africa in February,” the outlet wrote. As a result, British tomatoes might be late to the shelves, in fewer amounts and with higher prices, Lee Stiles, a representative from the Lea Valley Growers Association, noted. 

AMERICA, THE HUNGRY: A new assessment by the American Farmland Trust found that three out of every 10 acres of US corn and winter wheat in the midwest and plains regions are under “increased threat” from climate change, Ag Insider reported, via Successful Farming. The Trust estimates that 31% of corn and 30% of wheat land “face adverse changes in growing conditions by 2040”, if emissions continue to rise rapidly. The report urged policymakers to revise land stewardship and crop insurance portions of the new US farm bill. Separately, BBC News reported that 18,500 cows were killed in a Texas dairy farm explosion, “by far” the deadliest such fire in the past decade, since statistics-keeping on such events began.

WATER WOES: Vox reported on the “vanishing” Colorado River, whose waters help grow “as much as 90%” of all leafy winter greens consumed in the US, as well as animal feed crops. The outlet found that policies governing the river “have failed to adapt to the grim realities of climate change” and that “the only real option…for the river’s many beneficiaries [is] to use less, and using less is painful”. For the first time in US history, the Biden administration proposed to evenly cut water allotments, reducing water delivered to California, Arizona and Nevada “by as much as one-quarter”, the New York Times reported. 

PLANTS GONE VIRAL: The spread of plant viruses has increased in the past few decades because of “warmer and wetter weather”, New Scientist reported. Climate change is expected to supercharge these outbreaks, according to the story, which reported on a new study by Stanford University researchers. Dr Erin Mordecai and her colleagues analysed the proliferation of viral pathogens in 5,380 wild and agricultural plant populations across six continents from 1984 to 2019. Her team found that disease outbreaks tended to occur during warm spells in agricultural and cool-climate wild plant systems, but also in wild plant systems adapted to warm weather, when faced with a cold spell. In wild systems where the climate has historically been moist, they found that higher rainfall is associated with outbreaks.

Extra reading

• The farmers challenging the EU’s green agenda – Andy Bounds, Alice Hancock and Eleni Varvitsioti, Financial Times
• With new laws, Bangladesh hopes to change tack on dwindling forests – Kamran Reza Chowdhury, The Third Pole
• Pricing nature: can ‘biodiversity credits’ propel global conservation? – Zach St George, Yale Environment 360
• In Colombia, a story of coffee, family and climate change – Luke Ottenhof, Atmos

New science

Climate change unequally affects nitrogen use and losses in global croplands
Nature Food

Research found that global warming leads to “small temporal, but substantial spatial impacts” on cropland nitrogen use and losses. Researchers analysed historical yield, nitrogen-use and warming data between 1961-2018 from more than 150 countries. They found that compared to scenarios without global warming, yields increased in 29% of all countries and nitrogen-use efficiency increased in 56% of countries. They also used future climate scenarios to understand how these patterns will change in the future, and estimated that managing farm size could increase global cropland nitrogen use efficiency to over 70% by 2100.

Nigerians in poverty consume little wheat and wheat self-sufficiency programmes will not protect them from price shocks related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Nature Food

A study examined wheat self-sufficiency programmes proposed in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and found they “would have minimal impact” on food security in sub-Saharan Africa. With Nigeria as a case study, researchers used food consumption and price data to demonstrate that wheat constitutes only a small percentage of food consumption for poor Nigerians. The authors wrote that it is crucial to consider “country-context consumption patterns in response to external food system shocks”. Rather than focusing on wheat, the study recommended investing resources in other food commodities more critical to low-income Nigerians, primarily those grown under agroecological systems. 

Going beyond market-based mechanisms to finance nature-based solutions and foster sustainable futures
PLOS Climate

A paper drew on recent research on the usefulness, governance and practice of nature-based solutions to examine the limitations and risks of natural capital markets. The paper found that market-based mechanisms present “significant governance challenges, and risk further entrenching power asymmetries”. The authors argued that while market mechanisms are important to bridge the gap for biodiversity finance, they are not a “panacea” for scaling nature-based solutions. The researchers proposed four recommendations for finance mechanisms for biodiversity: (i) to focus on partnerships between people and nature, (ii) to recognise the contributions of Indigenous and local communities, (iii) to seek alternative sources of funding and (iv) to shift away from the drive for economic growth.

In the diary

• 27 April: [Webinar] Climate conversations: nature-based solutions | US National Academy of Sciences
• 27 April: [Webinar] Access and benefit-sharing measures and procedures and the Access and Benefit-sharing Clearing-House | UN Convention on Biological Diversity
• 27-28 April: Global stocktake April consultation | UNFCCC
• 29-30 April: First workshop on addressing loss and damage in the context of decisions | UNFCCC
• 8-10 May: AIM4Climate Summit, Washington, DC
• 11-12 May: Extinction or Regeneration Conference, London

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to [email protected].