Organic farming and the challenges of climate change

Summary

Climate change is without question one of the largest challenges that humankind has ever faced. This is not the least due to the enormous consequences that climate change will have for ecosystems and human society. Unfortunately, climate change also poses a very difficult problem for politicians to deal with. The core of the problem affecting modern democracies is that most people experience very little relationship between greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and their everyday life. There is both a temporal and spatial separation between emissions and impacts of climate change. The industrialized countries, which currently emit most of the greenhouse gases, are in general the least vulnerable to climate change effects. Additionally, many of the detrimental effects of climate change will happen far later (decades to centuries) than the greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore difficult to achieve substantial popular support for necessary and effective measures to mitigate climate change. Agriculture and food production plays an important role in this connection due to the importance of climate change for agriculture’s production basis and because of the large emissions of greenhouse gases from agriculture. For agriculture, the climate change challenge is therefore double – it must both adapt to the changes and at the same time reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases.