Media must play role in saving earth
Climate activists under the Pan African Climate Justice march on Kimathi Street, Nairobi, on October 13, 2022. Nationally Determined Contributions implementation is hindered by a fundamental lack of awareness and understanding of climate change issues.
Despite the glaring effects of climate change—deadly and more frequent heat waves, floods, wildfires and droughts that are getting ever more menacing by the minute, the emergency continues to get short shrift in the media as politics, crime and entertainment dominate the news headlines.
Even where climate change emergency is covered, there tends to be a fatalistic rather than empowering framing. Frightening statistics rendered with a catastrophic tone that paint climate change as irreversible discourages engagement.
Indeed, solution-based personable approaches that stress the benefits of mitigation and adaptation can be more effective in bringing about change than bare-bone statistics. Take, for instance, agriculture, which is both a victim and contributor to climate change. Farming is a major greenhouse gas emitter, contributing up to 29 per cent of the total stressors.
Resilient agriculture
Land clearance for cultivation exacerbates the effects of climate change. Fossil-fuel fertiliser generates nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Its manufacture and transport also leave huge fossil fuel footprints in their wake. Input-intensive farming also hurts carbon sequestration by depleting plants’ ability to store carbon in the soil.
On the other hand, rising temperatures, floods, storms, droughts and depleted lands—all effects of climate change—hurt agriculture with small-scale food producers across Africa being the most affected.
In the face of all this, restoration efforts are going on across the continent that need media highlighting and government support. This need to turn more light on restoration movements, which are critical in repairing the earth, was stressed at the Global Earth Repair Summit, which ended yesterday.
The conference at which I was privileged to be a speaker heard that agroecology (farming that works with nature) embeds diversity and resilience by building the ability to absorb carbon and adapt to the existential threat of climate change.
Frontline ‘warriors’ in restoration movements spoke of agroecology’s support for food sovereignty, nutrition, health and well-being, livelihoods and biodiversity. They also spoke of agroecology’s ecosystem services such as soil enrichment, pest control, pollination and cushion from extreme temperatures.
More media attention to this resilient agriculture that builds crop and diet diversity, respects climatic patterns, and empowers marginalised farmers will go a long way in drawing favourable policies and resources.
The 2022 Global Earth Repair Summit, which ran from October 21-24, was part of the pre-COP conversations that are building momentum for increased commitments towards mitigation and adaptation.
The 27th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—simply COP27—will take place next month in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and the message for regenerative agriculture as opposed fossil-fuel-driven farming is getting louder.
Proponents of industrial agriculture argue that Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has some of the most degraded and infertile soils on the planet, least productive farming and least intensive use of inorganic fertiliser, and that further reduction will hurt the continent.
Food autonomy
However, African civil society groups are calling for agroecology to be placed at the centre of the COP talks. They say that with continuing undernourishment in Africa and given the harmful effects of “failing industrial agriculture”, it’s important to adopt more sustainable farming systems.
Participants at a conference organised under the aegis of Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa last month primed agroecology as the continent’s surest path to food autonomy and an essential climate adaptation and mitigation measure. Indeed, earth repairing is more than the synthetic-versus-organic fertiliser dialectic; it involves holistic land and ecosystem management practices that can cool the world.
The media must give voice to all these efforts.
Mr Sigei, a senior training officer at the Media Council of Kenya (MCK) and former Agriculture Editor at ‘Nation’, is a journalist with an interest in restorative agriculture and climate change adaptation. [email protected].
