Climate instability is one of the defining crises experts across the globe acknowledge as critical to the longevity of agricultural systems and, by extension, human civilization. In a study published in the European Journal of Agronomy, researchers identify the climate crisis and land management systems (chemical-intensive versus organic) as playing a critical role in adversely affecting healthy soil ecosystems on a continental scale within wheat cropping systems.
While the researchers in this study cite climate change as the most influential factor across the European continent, public health and environmental advocates continue to point to the preponderance of scientific literature identifying the global benefits of organic over conventionally managed agroecosystems in a warming planet. According to a Limiting Overshoot – Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return, published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) earlier this month, the status quo is putting the Earth on an “unavoidable” pathway to exceed the 1.5-degree Celsius target, widely accepted by policymakers and researchers as critical to preventing global public health and biodiversity collapse.
This agricultural study also comes at a time when meteorologists blare warning signals of an unprecedented El Niño phenomenon exacerbated by humankind’s reliance on fossil fuels, part of what the World Meteorological Organization—the preeminent authority on climate science and related data analysis—defines as “a naturally occurring climate pattern known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), involving fluctuating ocean temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, coupled with changes in the overlying atmosphere.”
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