Climate Change & Conservation eNews
Communications
Home > Climate News >
All Articles
Agriculture
Communications
Community
Economy
Natural Areas
Renewables
Take Action
Wildlife
Regenerative grazing to mitigate climate change
Working with numerous partner organizations, team members from the four major Triangle research universities (Duke, NC Central, NC State, UNC) developed healthy soils policy recommendations for North Carolina, as well as tools to help producers and policy-makers understand the potential of grazing…
Spanish vineyards use solar panels to protect wine grapes
While combining solar energy and agricultural land is not new, one component that makes the Winesolar project stand out is that it will have a tracking system, with trackers from PVH, that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the most efficient solar panel positioning over the vines at any time, according to Iberdrola. Techedge, an IT firm, will help the solar panel project further the wineries’ agricultural goals.
Sensors in the vineyards will record data including soil humidity, wind conditions, solar radiation, and even vine thickness to find the optimal position for the solar panels, giving the vines a fighting chance against the effects of climate change…
Climate change drives rapid decadal acidification in the Arctic Ocean from 1994 to 2020
The Arctic is warming at a rate faster than any comparable region on Earth, with a consequently rapid loss of sea ice there. Qi et al. found that this sea ice loss is causing more uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide by surface water and driving rapid acidification of the western Arctic Ocean, at a rate three to four times higher than that of the other ocean basins. They attribute this finding to melt-driven addition of freshwater and the resulting changes in seawater chemistry.
How the Inflation Reduction Act helps rural communities
The Inflation Reduction Act recognizes the critical role that America’s farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners play in addressing the climate crisis. The law will:
- Invest in helping farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners deploy climate-smart practices that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase storage of carbon in soils and trees, and make their operations more productive.
- Support innovative, cost-effective ways to measure and verify climate benefits, including through USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Conservation Stewardship Program, Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, Regional Conservation Partnership Program, and Conservation Technical Assistance.
- Help up to 280,000 farmers and ranchers apply conservation to approximately 125 million acres of land.
Farmland preservationists, solar developers to build green energy arrays
An estimated 750,000 acres of farmland in the U.S. is lost each year and “solar development if done right could potentially help” save some of that farmland, said John Piotti, president and CEO of American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit organization that works to keep farmland in production.
Earlier this week, Piotti said during a webcast meeting that his group would work with two private firms, Edelen Renewables and Arcadia Solar to develop “agrivoltaic” community solar farms in a number of states including New York…
Carbon program
Downeast Lakes Land Trust began evaluating its potential to participate in the carbon market in 2009, and entered a partnership with Finite Carbon in 2010. Finite Carbon Corporation is a forest carbon development company that partners with landowners to create and monetize carbon offsets.
On July 2, 2010, Downeast Lakes Land Trust listed the 19,118-acre project with the Climate Action Reserve (CAR) as an improved forest management project. Improved forest management projects maintain or increase forest carbon stocks above the level expected under typical commercial forest management…
Solar workshop series
While this workshop is over, you can get a sense of what they are helping to amplify. The following is from their announcement:
Solar workshop series comes to southern Maryland: If you’re interested in using solar electricity to power your home, farm, or business, then please join an upcoming session of the University of Maryland’s “Solar Workshop Series.”
Saving Our Swamps [Letter in the New Yorker Magazine]
Here you will find a short letter submitted by the land trust’s executive director, under the heading “Letters respond to Annie Proulx’s piece about swamps” (and beavers as part of the climate solution):
The dewatering of North America that Proulx describes was underway well before the nineteenth century, when westward expansionists began cutting down forests and farmers began draining and tilling fields. By the time those people were “reclaiming” land for their use, fur traders had been wreaking havoc on our wetlands for almost two hundred years, through the commodification of beavers…
Passage of historic Inflation Reduction Act bill supports land trust work
The Inflation Reduction Act is landmark climate legislation that has the potential to reduce U.S. emissions by 40% by 2030, helping to reduce carbon in our atmosphere and buffering human and natural communities from the worst effects of climate change.
The IRA will fund critical Farm Bill conservation programs: land trusts and the landowners they work with will have access to an additional $1.4 billion for the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program to be allocated across four years, and the Regional Conservation Partnership Program will be increased by $4.95 billion during that period.
The Conservation Stewardship Program ($3.25 billion) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program ($8.45 billion) will also receive huge investments, and there is $1 billion in technical assistance for landowners who use these programs to reduce climate-related emissions…
Agrivoltaics looks at farming around/among solar panels
Double cropping solar power and organic dairy production works successfully here, but the concept – called agrivoltaics – is still very new.
Agrivoltaics is a new umbrella term defined as any farming practices on the land supporting solar power.
Around the world, innovators are looking for ways that solar panels and agriculture can benefit from the other. Flowers, pollinator plants, alfalfa, grass, vegetables and greens, and fruits and berries are some of the potential crops that people are planting in conjunction with solar panels…