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Photo: Serious Shea.
Community members stand by a tree planted in Senegal during the launch of the Great Green Wall Corporate Alliance, an initiative that is part of larger efforts to prevent desertification in Africa’s Sahel region. “Serious Shea,” says the Christian Science Monitor, “is transforming a previously firewood-dependent shea industry in Burkina Faso.”

When it comes to human rights and climate justice, corporations can get into the act. It can even boost their brand. Blogger Rebecca told me about a clothing company, Fair Indigo, where she buys clothes because the cotton is organic and she knows the workers are paid a fair wage. I myself have bought cotton towels at Patagonia, which has protected the environment for decades and now promises not to use cotton from Chinese forced labor.

At the Christian Science Monitor, Taylor Luck, Whitney Eulich, Ahmed Ellali, and Sandra Cuffe write about how various countries are working on water conservation — and how certain companies are helping.

“In Guatemala, farmers are setting up ‘living fences’ around fields, creating a buffer of roots to protect their soil during increasingly strong rainy seasons. In Jordan, local Bedouin communities and authorities are pioneering resilient desert agriculture in a region that has been hit by longer and more intense heat waves.

“And in Burkina Faso, William Kwende has been working to revolutionize shea butter production – by substituting renewable energy for traditional wood-burning methods that result in deforestation. He has introduced an approach with 100% renewable energy, self-sustaining biomass burners, and a closed water system, which is curbing emissions while also reducing crop losses. 

“At a time of global strain on food production, including an emerging famine in parts of East Africa, his story symbolizes the potential for using innovation to adapt to a changing climate.

The business Mr. Kwende co-founded, called Serious Shea, is designed to promote reforestation and to secure fairer wages and independence for the local women at the heart of the process. 

“A key part of the innovation: Serious Shea’s eco-processing centers transform shea tree biomass into natural biofertilizer and biochar, enriching soils that are at risk of desertification and reducing reliance on expensive imported chemical fertilizers. 

“ ‘People talk about water and food imports, but when you talk about food crises and adaptation, fertilizer is at the heart of it,’ Mr. Kwende tells the Monitor on the sidelines of COP 27 [Conference of Parties 27], this year’s global climate summit, at Sharm el-Sheikh. …

“Across the globe, innovative ideas like that are greatly needed. Extreme weather events are affecting the vital sector of food production – with the shifts especially hard for Indigenous communities and small-scale farmers. In Peru, rising temperatures have upended the livelihoods of alpaca farmers. In Pakistan, massive floods have sidelined several million acres from crop production. In Somalia and Kenya alone, drought threatens to push millions into food-poverty and starvation. …

“With its own farmers suffering losses amid intense heat waves and drop in Nile waters, atop the food-security crisis in the Horn of Africa, Egypt has placed agriculture front and center to an unprecedented degree at the current [COP]. …

“Agriculture experts say some of the solutions will involve mass-produced technologies such as battery-operated farm equipment. But it will also involve the rise and transfer of hundreds of local, homegrown solutions emerging across the world, many of which advocates say can cut carbon, improve resilience, and be replicated elsewhere. 

“In Mexico, where last summer eight of 32 states experienced moderate to extreme drought and where half of all municipalities in the country face water shortages, some farmers turn 2-liter soda bottles upside down over saplings to capture morning dew or dig holes and line them with organic materials like leaves, to retain rainfall around young trees.

“To the south in Peru, Alina Surquislla’s family has never seen anything like the current effects of rising temperatures in their three generations of alpaca herding. 

“There’s no water; the grass is turning yellow and disappearing for lack of rain,” says Ms. Surquislla. Alpacas are dying out at worrying rates. Speaking over a Wi-Fi satellite connection while walking at nearly 16,000 feet above sea level in the Apurimac region … for now, she says the answer for herders is to go to higher and higher elevations in search of water and grazing.

“Water is also scarce in Jordan. There, local Bedouin communities and authorities are scaling up pioneering desert agriculture in Al Mudawara, a border region near Saudi Arabia that has been hit by longer and more intense heat waves in the past few years. 

“Since 2019, under a directive by Jordan’s King Abdullah, each family in the area has been tending to 6-acre plots of yellow corn and green onions, watered from an underground aquifer. The crops have proved resilient to more frequent 120 degree F temperatures, sprouting up into green waves amid reddish desert sands that have not been utilized for agriculture in modern history. 

“Now over 4,000 acres of corn stalks stand 3 feet high and onions sprout in Al Mudawara. These provide alternative sources of income and living for Bedouin families, many of whom have been forced to abandon traditional camel shepherding due to the mounting costs of imported animal feed. …

“Says Abu Fahed al Huweiti, former director of the Al Mudawara Agricultural Cooperative that has steered the project. ‘It has given a new hope for people here.’

“In Tunisia, amid the lush fig and olive groves of Djebba, clinging to the tops of the Gorraa mountain, farmers continue a centuries-old terraced farming that has helped them cope with massive heat waves and drought that has hit much of Tunisia. 

“A series of cement-lined canals crisscross down the hill through the terraced farms, carrying water from natural springs fed by winter’s snow to groves of figs, pomegranates, quince, and olives on a rotating basis of collective water-sharing. 

“This ingenious method of traditional Berber farming provides timed irrigation of entire land plots, allowing local farmers to grow not only trees but also herbs and diverse flora and fauna, feeding livestock and chickens – all from the same measured water delivery. …

“ ‘We in Djebba keep using the same old techniques because it has shown success. It is an inherited model of coexistence and represents the ideal use of available water resources,’ says Fawzi Djebbi, Djebba farmer, activist, and head of the annual Djebba Fig Festival.  ‘Here we use the water as a collective resource from the mountains. This water belongs to all of us.’  

“Knowledge- and expertise-sharing has also been critical to speeding up farmers’ adaptation to the pummeling effects of severe weather events. 

“The CCDA, an Indigenous and small farmers movement for land rights and rural development in Guatemala, is working with many of their 1,300 affiliated communities around new techniques to help farmers adapt. This year’s rainy season has been one of the longest and heaviest this century, for example.

“One technique is planting trees and plants with deep roots around crop plots. The plants are a buffer against erosion, provide shade during the hot and dry season, and sometimes include edible plants as well. …

“Global organizations are seeking to spread helpful practices and information. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been teaming up with Vodafone to get early warning systems and messages to rural farmers across Africa to better prepare for projected climate trends and to provide advice on mitigation measures.” 

More at the Monitor, here.

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