Climate change forcing prairie farmers to carve new paths

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Manitobans who rely on the weather to make a living and turn a profit should be alarmed by the latest United Nations climate report, and should expect more extreme and unpredictable weather in the years and decades to come unless policymakers start to take climate change far more seriously, a local environmental advocate says.

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Curtis Hull, the project director with Climate Change Connection (CCC) a Manitoba-based environmental group, spoke to the Winnipeg Sun on Wednesday, two days after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented their latest report.

The report warned that it is likely that we will exceed 1.5 Celsius degrees of global warming in the next decade, unless there is a significant reduction in the usage and reliance on fossil fuels around the globe.

And while scientists and environmental advocates have been sounding the alarm for years about the effects of climate change, Hull said one of the industries in this province that has been seeing, and will continue to see the effects first-hand is farming, as extreme weather patterns are expected to continue.

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“Farmers are pretty resilient as a group, but they are starting to see the loss of stationarity and predictability in terms of farming practices,” Hull said.

“A lot of farmers learn from their forefathers in terms of their practices, but in many cases those practices simply do not work anymore, because with climate change you’ve now got this massive variability when it comes to climate.

“We now swing from years of massive drought to years of massive floods and precipitation, and it’s the kind of situation where farmers are losing the ability to use practices that were used in the past, because now you have to be prepared for absolutely anything.”

Hull said that if the situation with global warming continues on the trajectory it is on now, farmers and producers will continue to see their livelihoods and their bottom lines affected by extreme weather patterns.

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“Farming has already been cut to the bone as far as the economics are concerned, because the food system has moved towards more monopolization by four or five companies that control the market, and that gives producers little leverage, so if they have something that happens to their yield they are going to suffer even more, because they are so yield-dependent.”

Hull said that what the report tells him is we will see more seasons with extreme drought or extreme precipitation and “far less in between.”

“It looks to me like in this part of the world we are looking at the potential for both increased precipitation and for soil drying,” he said.

And while Hull said he knows many Manitobans who do what they can in their homes to reduce waste and battle the effects of climate change, he said at this point the only way that real and meaningful change can take place is for policymakers and governments to make substantial changes.

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“The actual policies that have been put in place so far have not changed that trajectory, and have actually kept us on this high-carbon pathway,” he said. “The policies in place have not been changing that pathway, and I don’t see policies reflective of what we really need to do, which is to greatly reduce that usage of fossil fuels.”

In 2017 Manitoba’s Climate Action Team (CAT) which is a coalition of environmental organizations in Manitoba, released Manitoba’s Road to Resilience, which Hull said is a “concrete and achievable roadmap” to greatly decreasing reliance on fossil fuels, but he said the only way to put those plans into motion are for governments to start taking “real actions.”

He added he doesn’t want to see this province or other areas of the world get to a point of “catastrophe” before more concrete steps are taken to combat the problem.

“We cannot carry on as usual going forward,” Hull said. “We can’t just have lip service, we need action.”

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— Dave Baxter is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Winnipeg Sun. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

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