Farmers help save the planet

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Tom Duncan was the guest speaker to a business webinar, in a series on The Meaning of Sustainability, organized by the Initiatives of Change Business & Economy Program, on 12 October.

Charlotte Piccoli

A big challenge for small farmers is the cost of assessing and measuring their carbon sequestration, as he and Charlotte Piccoli (left), an environmental engineer from Paris, emphasized. Microfinance was supporting farmers in places around the world such as the Sundarbans of West Bengal, where farmers breed honeybees and where Earthbanc can provide finance to expand bee keeping and mangrove restoration of blue carbon (carbon capture by the world's oceans and coastal ecosystems). ‘Regenerative farmers need to access funds at much cheaper rates of interest,’ Duncan said, and carbon payments can subsidise the transition to sustainable farming.

In Guatemala, Earthbanc assessed small scale farmers with an average of two hectares, covering a total area of 100,000 hectares. Their average income is $350 annually. Yet they could receive ‘life changing’ income through receiving $200 in carbon payments annually. And ‘more water-holding capacity leads to greater productivity and profitability. We are talking about a real revolution to democratize access to carbon markets and access to supply chain finances.’

Duncan said the need was to ‘collaborate in partnering projects, including with NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations]’ to address the ‘upfront costs of transferring to organic farming’. The target, he said, should be 2.5 billion hectares to sequester all of humanity’s emissions annually.

He concluded that Earthbanc’s call to action is to ‘people who want to align their own wealth with planetary health.’ And farmers were the best partners to help corporations and individuals offset their carbon emissions, with precisely measured carbon in trees and soil.

María Del Corral

In the group discussions that followed Duncan’s talk, Maria del Corral (right), a small-scale farmer from Colombia, said she had planted 1,160 trees of 25 species.

The British doyen of environmental journalists Geoffrey Lean pointed out that methane is responsible for 40 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, and drops out of the atmosphere within eight years, compared with the centuries that carbon dioxide remains. Tackling methane emissions, from cattle to rice paddy fields, through sustainable and regenerative feeding and planting methods, was ‘low hanging fruit’ that the world was only now beginning to wake up to. Tackling methane emissions ‘could have bought us decades’, he commented. He predicted this would be on the agenda of COP 26 in Glasgow, where world leaders will gather at the end of October to address ways to mitigate global warming.