A changing climate overall is likely to be negative for the agricultural sector and demands a significant amount of adaptation.

Rising production of biofuels has distorted government budgets, helped to drive up food prices and led to deforestation in south-east Asia, the chief scientist of Britain’s farm ministry said.
“The way we are currently producing biofuels is not the way to go,“ former World Bank chief scientist Robert Watson said, citing the US ethanol program and German support for biodiesel as among the least cost effective, Enn.com reported.
Watson told the Oxford Farming Conference that biofuels production from sugarcane in Brazil may be one of the only sustainable current methods.
He added that there needed to be aggressive research and development and in five to 10 years time it was possible that new, better technologies could be commercially viable.
Crispin Tickell, director of the Policy Foresight Program at Oxford University’s James Martin Institute of Science and Civilization, said US ethanol policy had been “disastrous.“
Tickell, whose former posts have included Chef de Cabinet to the President of the European Commission and President of the Royal Geographical Society, said more attention needed to be paid to renewable energy sources such as solar and geothermal.
“Biofuels have a role to play but only as one of a number of technologies,“ he told the conference.
Watson said climate change in the short-term was favorable for UK agriculture, lengthening the growing season but overall would be detrimental for the farming sector.
“A changing climate overall is likely to be negative for the agricultural sector and demands a significant amount of adaptation,“ he said.
Some have cited genetically modified crops, such as new drought resistant crop varieties, as key to adapting.
“Clearly it has potential but we need to look at it on a case by case basis,“ Watson said, warning however that some developing countries may be concerned about becoming dependent on seed companies such as US-based Monsanto.
Watson said farmers needed to be paid for environmental services such as capturing carbon or helping produce fresh water supplies.
“Agriculture is more than production,“ he said.
Tickell agreed, adding that agricultural markets “should operate within a clearly defined framework of public interest.“
“We should accept that agriculture is not a business like any other and it is a mistake to regard it as such,“ he said.
Tickell said there also needed to be greater focus on human diets involving more plants and less meat.
“We need to look at the healthy diet which on the whole we have tended to abandon,“ he said, noting the current concern about obesity in Britain.
“Greater consumption of meat in India and China has already driven up feed costs,“ he added.
Watson noted that about 850 million people globally were undernourished and an equal number were obese.

From a distance it looks like an island paradise, but get closer and those tall structures that could be palm trees turn out to be wind turbines--and the surf laps against wave barrages instead of sandy beaches. Welcome to “Energy Island“, a vision of how humans could help meet our future needs for energy, food and water using the power of nature in the tropics.
According to Guardian.co.uk, Alex Michaelis, the architect who gave David Cameron’s west London home a green makeover--complete with miniature wind turbine, solar panels and water recycling system--will launch the concept this year with a bid for funding worth $25m from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Prize.
His proposal, which is dramatically more ambitious than the work he did on the Conservative leader’s semi-detached house, is to build archipelagos of artificial islands that will produce electricity, clean water and even food in the belt of warm water that passes from the Caribbean across to the south China Sea, the Indian Ocean and west Africa.
Each island would be built on a floating platform and at its center would be a plant that converts heat from the tropical sea into electricity and drinking water.
Below deck would be marine turbines to harness energy from underwater currents and around the edge floating devices to provide wave power.
Vegetable farms and homes for workers will complete the colony and the power will be piped back to be used on the nearest populated land mass.
Michaelis, who is working together with his father Dominic, an engineer, estimates that each island complex could produce 250MW. It would take more than 50,000 installations to satisfy current world demand for energy, but Michaelis senior believes it is not impossible.
“If we consider that we are at war to find a new form of clean energy, wartime effort in world war two produced vast numbers of planes, tanks, ships and other armaments on both warring sides,“ he said. “20,300 Spitfires alone were built, making the construction of more than 50,000 of these plants seem a reasonable number.“
Branson is searching for an innovative idea that can cause a dramatic reverse in global warming and has given the world’s inventors until February 2010 to submit ideas. The Michaelis team is searching for funding to test the principles of its invention with a prototype, but believe that it could be the breakthrough that the billionaire and his panel of judges, including Al Gore and climate scientist James Lovelock, are looking for.
“For centuries we have been trying to master nature, but now our last hope is to work with nature,“ said Dominic Michaelis.
At the heart of each island is an ocean thermal energy conversion plant which can create electricity from sea water where the difference between the temperature of the surface water and the deep is 20C or more.
The warm sea water is pressurized to transform it into vapor which drives a turbine. The vapor is condensed against a surface cooled by water from the deep, to produce desalinated water. The energy from this technology, which was originally invented in 1881 by a French engineer, would be supplemented by wind turbines and a “power tower“ which captures energy from the sun by using mirrors to focus solar rays on a central “furnace“.
“Each energy island would operate in a similar way to an oil rig, with about 25 people living there to operate the energy systems and food farms,“ said Alex Michaelis.
“Teams of workers would spend six weeks on the island and six weeks off. The islands can be linked together so if you wanted a bigger power output you could simply build a bigger settlement. In the future these energy islands could be linked together to become eco-tourism attractions.“
According to the designs, the “energy islanders“ could farm sea food in pens beneath the deck and vegetables could be grown in shaded patches on the platform using some of the cold, desalinated water produced by the plant.
The islands are also designed to act as ports for supertankers to transport the 300,000 liters of desalinated water which will be produced each day. Sir Terry Farrell, the architect, has proposed that similar artificial islands should be built in the Thames estuary to provide a new port for London.
Robert Booth

Having visited high-end woodworking facilities in Europe, Mark Richey knew there was a better way to heat his own semi-industrial wood shop in Newburyport.
The solution? Throw the leftover sawdust, wood shavings and scraps from his woodworking building into a furnace--and, presto, enough renewable “biomass“ energy to heat the 130,000-square-foot Mark Richey Woodworking Inc. facility, Bostonherald.com reported.
It wasn’t quite as simple as that. The job entailed getting a first-of-its-kind environmental emissions permit, buying state-of-the-art equipment from Germany and saving up enough wood byproducts in giant outdoor silos before he could flick the switch on the sophisticated, highly computerized system.
But the massive heating system started running last month--and Richey is no longer paying $60,000 a month for gas to heat his facility, while also helping the environment by using a renewable energy source that doesn’t throw added carbon pollutants into the atmosphere.
“Before installing (the new system), I always thought it was crazy of me to throw out this perfectly good wood fuel in landfills,“ said Richey, whose business does high-end work for restaurants, law firms and corporations that want custom-made cabinets, shelves, paneling and other items for their shops and offices. Some of Mark Richey’s local clients include Legal Seafood, Bain Capital, Harvard University and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Amid worries about global warming and high energy costs, a number of firms are jumping into the business of biofuels--or the burning of non-fossil fuels to create energy, whether from wood, corn or simple leftover vegetable oil from restaurants.
While burning wood does produce carbon, the use of biomass fuels is considered “carbon neutral“ because the products were always part of the above-ground ecosystem. Oil and natural gas, however, are pumped from deep beneath the earth’s surface--and their later burning introduces additional carbon into the atmosphere that wasn’t there before.
Among other projects, three biomass power plants are now scheduled to be built in Massachusetts, thanks in part to Gov. Deval Patrick’s aggressive push to make Massachusetts a leader in the renewable-fuels field.
“We’re starting to see a broader acceptance of biomass,“ said Ian Bowles, Patrick’s secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs.
Seth Kaplan, an attorney at Boston’s Conservation Law Foundation, said biomass fuels are fine--“if they’re handled the right way.“
It doesn’t do the environment any good if wood-burning furnaces throw ash and other products into the air--and if the large amount of wood that’s burned comes from the clear cutting of trees that aren’t replaced, he said.
Richey said his on-site biomass system addresses those concerns.
Some of the wood byproducts thrown into Richey’s furnace do include glue and other chemicals (from plywood and other wood items). But the German-made system’s advanced scrubbers, filters and intense heat prevents those pollutants from being thrown into the air, he said.
He said his company went out of its way to get a permit from state regulators to make sure the system met emission standards. “It’s cleaner than the oil furnace in your house,“ he said.
At a cost of $500,000 and with annual maintenance expenses, the biomass furnace system at Mark Richey Woodworking will take about eight to 10 years to pay for itself, Richey said.