More farmland goes organic, but the Netherlands still trails in Europe

DutchNews, January 22, 2020 

Organic curly cale being farmed in Noord Holland. Photo: DutchNews.nl

The amount of Dutch farmland devoted to organic fruit, cereals and vegetables grew by 4% last year, according to figures from official regulator Skal. 

In total, the amount of land used for organic farming has doubled in 10 years, and now just over 2,000 of the 50,000 Dutch farming companies are classified as organic. 

Nevertheless, despite the growth, the Netherlands is still trailing in European terms. Just 3.2% of the total amount of cultivated land in the Netherlands is farmed without pesticides and artificial fertiliser, compared with a European average of 7.5%. In Austria almost a quarter of farmland is devoted to organic farming. 

One reason for this, according to Michael Wilde, from organic farming lobby group Bionext, is that the Dutch government does not provide any subsidies for organic farming. 

And one scheme, to help farmers move from traditional to organic farming was scrapped several years ago, Wilde told the Financieele Dagblad.

Right fire for right future: how cultural burning can protect Australia from catastrophic blazes

The Guardian, Lorena Allam, Sat 18 Jan 2020

Traditional knowledge has already reduced bushfires and emissions in the top end, so why isn’t it used more widely?

Kija Rangers conduct prescribed burning in the East Kimberley in 2019.
Photograph: Supplied/Kimberley Land Council

Indigenous fire practitioners have warned that Australia’s bush will regenerate as a “time bomb” prone to catastrophic blazes, and issued a plea to put to use traditional knowledge which is already working across the top end to reduce bushfires and greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is a time bomb ticking now because all that canopy has been wiped out,” says Oliver Costello of the national Indigenous Firesticks Alliance.

“A lot of areas will end up regenerating really strongly, but they’ll return in the wrong way. We’ll end up with the wrong species compositions and balance.

 “That’s why we need to get Indigenous fire practices out into the landscape in the coming months, to start to read the country and look at areas that need restoration burning in the short term.”

As Australia comes to terms with this season’s catastrophic fires, Indigenous practitioners like Costello are advocating a return to “cultural burning”.

What is cultural burning?

Small-scale burns at the right times of year and in the right places can minimise the risk of big wildfires in drier times, and are important for the health and regeneration of particular plants and animals.

Different species relate to fire in different ways, Costello explains. Wombats, for example, dig burrows to escape, while koalas climb into the canopy.

“When you understand the fire relationships they have, their own fire culture, then you are really applying the right fire for that culture so that you’re supporting the identity of that place.

“When you do that, you get more productive landscapes, you get healthier plants and animals, you get regeneration, you discourage invasive elements, which are sometimes native species that might belong in the system next door.

“It’s so important to apply that right fire for right country, so you can maintain the right balance.”

Aboriginal rangers and traditional owners conduct burns in the Katiti-Petermann
 Indigenous Protected Area, in the remote desert country near the Western
Australia and Northern Territory border. Photograph: Helen Davidson/The Guardian

Dr David Bowman is a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. Bowman describes Indigenous fire management as “little fires tending the earth affectionately”.

“The affectional is the opposite of mechanical. It’s with emotion. So it can be reverence, affection, fear, a whole range of emotions, but it’s an emotional relationship you have with land using fire to create mosaics and flammable habitat mosaics, which are really good for biodiversity and a really good way of managing fuel load.”

Where is it used in Australia?

In northern Australia, Indigenous land ownership is widespread. Caring for country and ranger programs in protected areas has delivered a degree of autonomy to traditional owners to walk the country, burning according to seasonal need and cultural knowledge.

Indigenous fire management involves “cool” fires in targeted areas during the early dry season, between March and July. The fires burn slowly and in patches.

In the Kimberley, the Land council holds community fire planning meetings throughout the early dry season to ensure the correct people are burning their country.

“Traditional owners are consulted and native title holders design burn lines and fire walk routes,” the KLC acting CEO Tyronne Garstone says.

“These burn lines are approved by the group and Indigenous rangers perform the on-ground work, backed up by modern technology with rangers taking constant weather readings and recording the conditions of the day.

“They work very well at combining the old people’s fire practices with modern techniques.”

Even so, climate change is affecting their ability to do “right way” fire management, Garstone says.

“These ‘right way’ fire days are getting fewer and fire behaviour is changing along the same lines as over east. Late season conditions are also driving more fires in unusual ways due to the climatic conditions we are currently facing.”

Kija Rangers conduct prescribed or ‘cool’ burning in the East Kimberley
in the dry season, 2019. Photograph: Supplied/Kimberley Land Council

How effective is it?

The Darwin centre for bushfire research at Charles Darwin University maps bushfires weekly. Since traditional burning was reintroduced on a large scale, the centre has collected enough data to show that the area of land destroyed by wildfires has more than halved, from 26.5m hectares in 2000, to just 11.5m hectares in 2019.

“We have annual fires up here,” the centre’s research fellow Andrew Edwards says. “Forty per cent of the top end could burn every year. So we had to do something about that.”

“We were originally much more interested in biodiversity, Aboriginal employment and getting people back on country to manage it properly, but when the carbon economy came along we saw a way to manage fire to abate greenhouse gas emissions.

“It was pretty bad before that happened,” Edwards says. “It was just fires running wild across huge tracts of north Australia that nobody was doing anything about.”

Edwards says the top end cooperative model can be adapted to southern conditions.

“That’s what needs to be looked at. Obviously there’s a lot more infrastructure to set up, but it’s collaboration and education.

“If we want to manage our natural environment properly, we need to be doing prescribed burning. There’s so much cultural knowledge out there still, and it’s being totally ignored. There’s hundreds of Indigenous rangers out there now doing this work.”

The Oriners and Sefton Savannah Burning Project creates carbon credits, using
strict scientific methodologies, approved through a rigorous accreditation process
with the Department of Environment, to store carbon in the natural landscape.
Photograph: Richard Wainwright/Caritas Australia

Will these practices be widely adopted?

In southern Australia, Oliver Costello says, Aboriginal knowledge systems are far less valued but hold important solutions.

The Coag national bushfire management policy includes a commitment to “promote Indigenous Australians’ use of fire”, but Indigenous fire groups like Firesticks Alliance say they need more resources to build capacity.

“There are a lot of policy settings at a high level that support us, but there’s nothing in between. There’re no resources,” Costello says.

“There’s no investment really outside of northern Australia Indigenous fire management of any significance, and they had to build a whole new economy to support it through carbon.

“There’s always investment going into future firefighting capacity, more trucks, more helicopters, more this, more that. What we need is people getting out into the landscape now, with the knowledge to start to heal it.

A small cool burn managed by Indigenous firesticks alliance.
Photograph: Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation/PA

Professor Bowman says it is possible to “blend Aboriginal with European and modern scientific approaches to create an opportunity for all land users and land owners”.

He suggests small-scale local “Green fire” groups modelled on the Landcare program.

“I would like to see a crossover between Indigenous and mainstream fire management groups, where there can be exchange and recognition.

“Because in the end there’s two things which are important to [remember]: all humans have come from a fire management background in their cultures, it’s just that some cultures ended up obliterating that knowledge because of industrialisation.

“We should really prioritise employment of Aboriginal people. But when there’s a gap we could be filling that gap with community groups. And there’s a really good opportunity for Aboriginal people to be involved in training.

“We need to encourage and promote the philosophy of Aboriginal fire practice because that’s going to be a really important pathway for sustainable fire management and also for healing because so many communities have been traumatised and shocked by the scale of the burning.”

Costello says the areas that haven’t burned this time around are now even more vulnerable.

“They are critical parts of the landscape [that need] to be able to support the animals and plants that have survived. And so those areas are going to be under increasing pressure and they’re also at risk of a future fire.

“There was an economy before settlement that supported this, a resource economy based on people looking after the land and having all that they needed.

“Now in the modern society it revolves around money. So we need to build economies that support cultural practice and acknowledge traditional custodianship.

“There’s all this canopy that’s been burnt away. We’ve got knowledge and techniques that can help heal that country in the future. It’s going to take some time. We’ve got probably two or three years before we can really be effective in some of that country because it needs to recover. But if we don’t get in there after that, then we miss our chance.”

The much welcomed rain in Australia might be too much of a good thing, as flash floods were reported in some area https://t.co/rNjVYeiU9T pic.twitter.com/Bgml3Yz50f

— AFP news agency (@AFP) January 18, 2020

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(*)  Kryon explains what is going on with the Weather/Climate Change 

(**) Kryon gives Australia fire suggestions

Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

Yahoo – AFP, Tom BARFIELD, January 16, 2020

Germany is exiting coal far too late, campaigners say (AFP Photo/Ina
FASSBENDER)

Frankfurt am Main (AFP) - Bowing to public pressure on climate change, Germany on Thursday promised to speed up its exit from coal power generation and to pay operators compensation in a strategy instantly rejected by environmental campaigners.

With the announcement that coals could be history by 2035, instead of 2038 as previously planned, "the exit from coal begins now, and it's binding," Environment Minister Svenja Schulze told reporters in Berlin.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and premiers from the states of Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg agreed overnight a "shutdown plan" for the country's power plants using the highly polluting fossil fuel.

The scheme will be written into a draft law set to be presented later this month and ratified by mid-2019.

Meanwhile the government will compensate coal plant operators to the tune of 4.35 billion euros ($4.9 billion) for plants set to fall off the grid in the 2020s alone, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said.

The payouts "will be spread out over the 15 years following the shutdown" and represent an "affordable and in my view good result," Scholz added.

Giant RWE, with its power stations in North Rhine-Westphalia, will take the lion's share at 2.6 billion euros.

But the group complained that was "well below" the 3.5 billion of losses it expects.

Some 3,000 jobs are set to go at the energy firm "in the short term" and 6,000 by 2030, mostly via early retirement, RWE added.

That represents around 60 percent of RWE workers in the especially dirty brown-coal sector and one-quarter of the company's total workforce.

'Too late!'

Plans to wind down coal power by 2038 have been in the air since last year, and the three-year cut to the timetable did not impress environmentalists.

"Exiting coal is not a technical challenge, but a question of political will... 2035 is much too late!" tweeted Ende Gelaende, a protest group that has organised multiple occupations of brown coal mines.

Thursday's deal lays out for the first time in detail which brown coal plants will be shut down when, beginning with one operated by RWE near the massive Garzweiler open-pit mine in western Germany.

The plan also provides for an end to the razing of the ancient Hambach forest, which had been threatened by another open-cast project and became a symbol of the anti-coal movement.

RWE said more than half of its 2.1 billion tonnes of coal reserves would now remain buried.

But environmentalist group BUND complained that the government's scheme pushes more closures back beyond 2030, keeping some plants running longer than previously thought.

New coal plant

Activists also highlighted that the latest plan will still allow a newly-built coal power plant in the Rhineland known as Datteln 4 to begin operation.

"It's simply absurd," tweeted Luisa Neubauer, a leading figure of Germany's "Fridays for Future" protest movement.

In coal-mining regions, the state plans an "adjustment fund" for workers in plants and mines to compensate them until 2043.

And the coal zones will receive 40 billion euros in support by 2038.

The task of quitting coal has been complicated by Merkel's decision to end nuclear power generation by 2022.

At one-third of Germany's electricity supply, the fossil fuel is the main backstop to sometimes intermittent current from renewables during the transition period.

A plan agreed in December under pressure from demonstrators calls for Germany to reduce output of greenhouse gases by 55 percent compared with 1990's levels.

The country has already admitted it will miss an intermediate target for 2020.

Russia unveils climate 'adaptation' plan

Yahoo – AFP, Maria ANTONOVA, January 5, 2020

Snow problem: Russia will also look at "positive" effects of climate change such
as are decreased energy use in cold regions, expanding agricultural areas
and navigational opportunities in Arctic waters (AFP Photo/Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV)

Moscow (AFP) - The Russian government has published a plan to adapt the economy and population to climate change, aiming to mitigate damage but also "use the advantages" of warmer temperatures.

The document, published on the government website on Saturday, outlines a plan of action and admits that changes in the climate have had a "prominent and increasing effect" on socioeconomic development, people's lives, health and industry.

Russia is warming 2.5 times quicker than the planet on average, and the two-year "first stage" plan is an indication that the government officially recognises this as a problem, even though President Vladimir Putin denies that human activity is the cause.

It lists preventive measures such as dam building or switching to more drought-resistant crops, as well as crisis preparations including emergency vaccinations or evacuations in case of a disaster.

The plan is needed to "lower the losses and use the advantages".

It says climate change poses risks to public health, endangers permafrost, increases the likelihood of infections and natural disasters. It also can lead to different species being pushed out of their usual habitats.

Possible "positive" effects are decreased energy use in cold regions, expanding agricultural areas and navigational opportunities in the Arctic ocean.

Unseasonably warm Christmas

The document lays the groundwork for various agencies and stresses the need for more research on economic vulnerabilities, without detailing financing.

Among a list of 30 measures, the government will calculate risks of Russian products becoming uncompetitive and failing to meet new climate-related standards as well as prepare new educational materials to teach climate change in schools.

Russia is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, with vast Arctic regions and infrastructure built over permafrost. Recent floods and wildfires have been among the planet's worst climate-related disasters.

Russia formally adopted the Paris climate accord in September of last year and criticised the US withdrawal from the pact.

Putin however has repeatedly denied the scientific consensus that climate change is primarily caused by man-made emissions, blaming it last month on some "processes in the universe".

He has also criticised Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, painting her as an uninformed impressionable teenager possibly being "used" in someone's interests.

He also voiced scepticism on numerous occasions about solar and wind energy, expressing alarm about the danger of turbines to birds and worms, causing them to "come out of the ground" by vibrating.

While there is evidence of that large wind-power installations can pose a risk to birds, known research does not suggest they harm worms.

On Sunday, Russia's meteorological service predicted temperatures up to 16 degrees Celsius higher than normal Monday and Tuesday, when Russia celebrates Orthodox Christmas.

"Weather on Christmas will be warmer than normal almost on the entire Russian territory," it said on its website.

The service said temperatures were expected to be four to eight degrees higher than normal in the European part of the country, and 10 to 16 degrees higher beyond the Urals.

Power supply fears as troops called to battle Australia bushfires

Yahoo – AFP, Holly ROBERTSON, with Andrew Beatty and Glenda Kwek in Sydney, ,January 4, 2020

Temperatures have soared above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in Australia,
and gale-force winds have fanned hundreds of fires (AFP Photo/PETER PARKS)

Skies turned black and ash rained down as fires raged across southeastern Australia on Saturday, threatening power supplies to major cities and prompting the call-up of 3,000 military reservists.

Temperature records were smashed, and gale-force winds pounded fire-stricken coastal communities in the two most populous states New South Wales and Victoria.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian warned that worst-case scenario projections were "coming to fruition", although large-scale evacuations meant the human toll was minimised.

Since late September, 23 people have died, more than 1,500 homes have been damaged and an area roughly twice the size of Belgium or Hawaii has burned.

Location of areas affected by fires since September 2019 in Australia (AFP Photo/Simon MALFATTO)

The latest fatalities were in Kangaroo Island -- a tourist haven southwest of Adelaide -- when two people were trapped in a car overrun by flames on Friday.

But strong winds and high temperatures continued to fuel hundreds of fires and cause chaos.

Bushfires took out two substations and transmission lines, prompting authorities in New South Wales to warn that an area home to almost eight million people and the nation's largest city Sydney could experience rolling blackouts.

"We are in for a long night and we have still to hit the worst of it," Berejiklian warned as another total fire ban was declared for Sunday.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the largest military call-up in living memory, mobilising 3,000 reservists to assist thousands of volunteer firefighters who have been battling the blazes.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called up 3,000 military reservists to tackle 

Australia's relentless bushfire crisis (AFP Photo/PETER PARKS)

"Today's decision puts more boots on the ground, puts more planes in the sky, puts more ships at sea," said Morrison, who made the announcement after being pilloried for his response to the deadly disaster.

But even that move prompted outrage when his Liberal Party turned it into a campaign ad, with shadow minister for international development Pat Conroy accusing Morrison of trying to "exploit a national tragedy".

Record temperatures

A state of emergency had been declared across much of the heavily populated southeast and more than 100,000 people were told to leave their homes across three states.

Thousands heeded that call on Friday, abandoning summer holidays and piling into cars that clogged the highways linking southeastern coastal towns with the relative safety of Sydney or larger towns.

With temperatures expected to rise, a state of emergency has been declared across 

much of Australia's heavily populated southeast (AFP Photo/SAEED KHAN)

Several emergency warnings were issued on Saturday, and there were fears that one blaze southwest of Sydney could reach the city's outskirts.

Sydney recorded its highest-ever temperature of 48.9 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit) in the western suburb of Penrith, and the nation's capital Canberra hit 44 degrees Celsius, also an all-time record, a Bureau of Meteorology spokesman said.

Thousands of volunteer firefighters battled the infernos as some residents stayed behind to defend their homes.

Just outside the seaside town of Batemans Bay, a four-hour drive south of Sydney, locals joined forces with firefighters to tackle the blazes.

A dehydrated and injured Koala receives treatment after its rescue from a bushfire 

(AFP Photo/SAEED KHAN)

"Today, we've had nothing short of a disaster. A very large fire-front came through... the high temperatures and the southerly change is putting a real lot of pressure on the resources that we have," local Adam Pike told AFP.

"Guys that know the bush, guys that know fire, helped save at least 10 to 12 homes on this street... we are so grateful for their help."

The only activity in the usually bustling tourist hotspot was at an evacuation centre, where hundreds of locals forced from their homes were sheltering on an open field in tents and caravans.

A helicopter drops water on a bushfire in Batemans Bay in New South Wales (AFP Photo/

PETER PARKS)

Mick Cummins, 57, and his wife fled to the evacuation centre when fire ripped through their rural town on New Year's Eve.

"We said this is too tough for us, let's get out. We went to the beach and then hellfire came over the hill," he told AFP.

"I was here in the '94 fires. I thought that was bad. That was just a barbeque" in comparison, he said.

Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison (L) has faced sustained anger for his
handling of the months-long bushfire crisis (AFP Photo/James ROSS)

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