REPS 4 is politically correct
Farmers have to be seen to play their role in environmental protection, as climate change strikes home with a vengeance.
Some 60,000 farmers have already been doing more to protect the rural landscape, increase biodiversity, and improve water quality, by taking part in the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. Now, they can make an even bigger effort, by availing of more than €400m annually in aid for the next seven years, co-funded by the EU, to help them enhance the environment through a range of actions — including reduced use of fertilisers and pesticides, contributing to lower greenhouse gas emissions, thus slowing the climate change which farmers here experienced themselves when much of the country was hit by June and July rainfall between two and half and three and a quarter times the normal levels.
Mullingar had its wettest July since 1960, and tornadoes or funnel clouds and waterspouts were observed from a number of locations in July. Strangely, it was the first month since March 2006 that temperatures were not above the 1961 to 1990 average at all Irish weather stations.
But don’t think for a moment that global warming has paused.
On the contrary, global land temperatures have this year reached their highest levels since records began in 1800.
And the record-breaking weather extremes in almost every continent — floods, droughts, heat waves and storms — are consistent with predictions of what would happen as the world’s climate grows warmer.
Global land surface temperatures in 2007 were 1.89°C warmer than average for January, and 1.37°C warmer than average for April. If temperatures rise 3°C above pre-industrial levels, global warming would become irreversible, say experts from the Intergovernmental Group on Climate Change.
Already this year, the first ever documented cyclone in the Arabian Sea, with maximum sustained winds of nearly 148km/h, affected more than 20,000 people in Oman on June 6.
Heavy rains in June ravaged southern China, affecting more than 13.5 million people. In England and Wales, the period from May to July was the wettest since records began in 1766.
Germany also saw its wettest May since countrywide observations started in 1901 — in sharp contrast with the previous month, which was its driest April since 1901.
The worst flooding in six years hit Mozambique in February, while abnormally heavy and early rainfall in Sudan since the end of June caused the Nile and other seasonal rivers to overflow.
A series of large swell waves swamped 68 islands in the Maldives, while early May brought Uruguay’s worst flooding since 1959. There were two record-breaking heat waves in southeastern Europe in June and July. In May, Moscow recorded its highest temperature since 1891. In July, temperatures in Argentina and Chile plunged to minus 22°C and minus 18°C, respectively. South Africa, on June 27, had its first significant snowfall since 1981 (25cm in parts of the country).
More recently, monsoon extremes and incessant rains caused large-scale flooding all over South Asia, resulting in many hundreds of deaths, displacement of more than 10 million people, and destruction of vast areas of croplands, livestock and property.
Against this background, there is no hope that farming countries can expand without care for the environment. New Zealand farmers are finding this out now, as they race to fill the huge global dairy product shortage which has sent milk prices to record levels worldwide.
Jeanette Fitzsimons, co-leader of New Zealand’s Green Party has said the country’s dairy industry should be charged for its impact on the environment. Instead, she said, free use of publicly owned and scarce water is among the benefits the industry receives.
She also said farmers’ increasing land use for dairying incurs no charge for any loss of biodiversity, landscape and shelter, nor the use of the atmosphere as a dumping ground for methane and nitrous oxide, while others pick up the costs of a changing climate. New Zealand dairy groups have rebuffed the charges, insisting the world is better off because meat and dairy products produced in New Zealand use less energy than almost anywhere else.
When milk quotas are increased and eventually scrapped in 2013, Irish dairy farmers will hope to join New Zealand in an expansion race. But the way things are going, farmers’ plans will have to get the environmental go-ahead, such is the growing worry over climate change.
So version four of the Rural Environment Protection Scheme seems to have arrived in good time. It’s open to more dairy farmers than ever before, and before it finishes in 2013, don’t be surprised if a few supplementary schemes, to further reduce farming’s contribution to climate change, are added to REPS 4.
