Allan Savory at COP26: A Talk on Agriculture and Climate Change

There is a growing demand for world leaders to act on climate change. This is the 26th conference discussing what they should do. The 25 million dollar Virgin Earth challenge seeking solutions fizzled out and now the Royal Foundation and Prince William seek solutions through the Earthshot Prize rewarding innovation. Everyone knows that we cannot solve any problem without addressing its root cause.

So what is the root cause of climate change? Most people believe it is caused by greenhouse gases and fossil fuels, deforestation and livestock. Solutions focus on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, manufacturing meat to replace livestock and planting billions of trees, protecting tropical forests to heal our planet, losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. 

I have been invited to talk about how regenerative agriculture might help address these causes and sequester carbon in the soil. I do not, intend to do so because I know so little about agriculture, carbon or soil, and more knowledgeable speakers than I are doing so.

While I fully support regenerative agriculture and the rapid replacement of fossil fuels, I want to talk about something I believe is of greater importance. My subject is the root cause of the problem, because as everyone knows, unless world leaders address that, we will not succeed.

I will also propose an immediate action that perhaps the Royal Foundation can lead, which will enable world leaders to see a simple way to address the cause of the problem. So what is the cause of the problem? After decades of denial that humans are causing climate change, now almost all scientists acknowledge that we are causing it. This acknowledgement is profound but it’s significance has been lost on the media and society.

If we are causing climate change, then management is the root cause and not the things we blame. It is how we manage coal, oil, livestock, forests, food production, and other resources that results in biodiversity loss, desertification, megafires, and climate change. What could we recommend world leaders do about management when we manage millions of things daily? 

This seems an almost impossible task.

Society believes that we manage many things, but is that true? It is true that we produce millions of things daily, such as cars, cell phones, clothing, computers, art, weapons, and various forms of food – grains, fruits, potatoes, poultry, beef, fish, etc. 

Participants at COP26 are discussing producing electricity less harmfully from nature – sun, wind, geothermal, nuclear. Many are discussing corporate industrial production of food based on chemistry and smart technology, while a few are discussing farmers producing food based on the biological sciences.

Everything that we produce is not self-organizing. This means that it stops if we stop producing it including food. A part breaks, a battery or fuel runs out. We can produce things independently, cell phones or violence, different forms of food or weapons. Nothing that we make or produce is managed, it is produced. So, this is not where our problem lies, although it will dominate discussion at COP26 and to COP100.

What then do we manage that is causing the problem?

We manage only three things. Humans, our lives, families and organizations. And we manage economies and nature or environment from which we produce everything making civilization possible.

These three things we do not produce or make, we manage them. Each of these continues, although in changed form, no matter how many millions of people die, no matter if entire economies collapse, and no matter how many species go extinct, humans, nature and economy are inseparable as COVID pandemic has taught us. And the complexity of humans, our cultures, organizations, economy and life-sustaining environment can only be managed indivisibly.

Our inability to manage this indivisible complexity is the cause of the problem. And this is what COP26 participants need to advise world leaders how to do, because we citizens cannot do so at grass roots. Let me explain. Each of us can manage our lives and families, but only to a point. Because we are doing so within our local economy and global finance is driving environmental destruction. As grassroots individuals and families, we cannot act by managing our own lives to save mankind from the environmental catastrophe we face. Beyond the human level of our families, we manage at the institutional scale through corporations, governments, universities, churches, environmental and other organizations.  Most humans today cannot make a toothbrush because corporations do so.

Institutions generally do what they’re formed to do efficiently, by managing themselves, their finances, and through these, nature at scale. Everything humans produce comes from nature and returns to nature. Governments manage through policies, laws, regulations dictating management at national scale, and in earlier societies managed at scale through customs and taboos.

In summary, management at a large scale through institutional policies is the cause of the problem. Now how can we advise world leaders to address that when there are so many hundreds of ways of developing policies? 

Society believes there are many ways of developing policies – scientifically, dictatorially, democratically and so on, but again is this true?

Over years of working with thousands of fellow scientists and resource managers, we discovered a new management insight. Governments, democratic or dictatorship, develop policies in exactly the same way.

They develop policy with the reason and the context being to meet a need, a desire, or to address a problem. The policy is then developed based on advice from highly trained experts, often in integrated scientific teams, interested parties, pressure groups, as well as of course their own political persuasions.

Such policies automatically reduce the complexity of humans, economy and nature to meeting a desire, need or addressing a problem. That is reductionist in a world that is holistic.

While the reasons for policies will never change, political leaders and governments do not develop policy in a context that embraces complexity by tying our lives, economies and behavior to our life-supporting environment or nature far into the future. A way of developing policy that does address the cause of the problem. Now let me illustrate with a future pandemic and climate change example. Agriculture and biodiversity loss in National Parks. Agriculture is the production of food and natural fibre from the world’s land and waters. Harvesting fish from the oceans, wildlife, timber, livestock and crop production are all agriculture. Without agriculture we cannot have an orchestra, church, university, bank or any business or economy. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization. Almost our entire planet is engaged in agriculture – about 6% in crop production and 94% in non-crop production fisheries, wildlife, livestock, forestry.

Globally biodiversity is in free-fall, ocean life and tropical forests are being decimated, and man-made deserts are expanding. 

We are producing 20 times as much dead, eroding soil every year as food we need for every human alive today. Where I live, I am surrounded by some 30 national parks in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia.

Intended to preserve biodiversity, these parks are some of our worst examples of biodiversity loss and desertification contributing to future pandemics and climate change. If we look at these national parks, or those in New Mexico where I lived for 40 years, we see the canaries in our mine dying wholesale.

This we cannot attribute to climate change, fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, livestock, deforestation, corporate profiteering, greed, corruption, poaching, hunting, or excessive animal numbers, none of which is the cause of the problem.

The cause is the management dictated by the policies of environmental organizations, governments and international agencies. 

This is something I became aware of as a young ecologist and began studying 70 years ago.

Earlier I said that society’s belief that there are many ways of developing policy was, we learned, a false belief. Let me now deal with another management belief that is false.

Society believes that we have many options to address global desertification, playing a major role in climate change, and the point at which we can begin to break the cycle of desertification megafires and climate change spiraling out of control. This cycle cannot be broken at the atmospheric level of green house gases because if we stopped all fossil fuel burning entirely tomorrow biodiversity loss, desertification and climate change would continue.

We are a tool-using animal, using all the money, labour and creativity in the world. No human can even drink milk without using technology, unless we go to a cow and use hand and mouth to suck. We cannot even plant a tree without a tool.

We can only reverse desertification using tools.

For brevity, I will simply refer to a 2013 TED Talk I gave on reversing desertification, viewed by now some 9 million people and refuted by no scientist who has studied the process. In that talk, I pointed out that we have three tools with which to address desertification. We can use fire, we can use technology and all its manifestations, or we can use the concept of resting the environment as a positive action to allow biodiversity to recover. This latter is being advocated as rewilding of vast areas of the world to restore biodiversity. Two of these tools lead to desertification and the third technology even in science fiction cannot prevent it as I described in that TED talk.

No amount of management or policies can address the problem without a tool that can reverse desertification. No amount of conferences from COP1 to COP100 or prizes and awards will save future generations unless we replace beliefs with science and address the cause of climate change.

Now I, like everyone at COP26, would like to see a positive outcome that helps world leaders by saying not what they should do, but showing how it can be done by developing policy in a way that does address the cause of the problem.

I would like to propose that one outcome of COP26 participants, media and independent reporters is support for the idea of having one internationally observed case in which the government of a small nation develops an agricultural policy embracing the complexity. The knowledge needed to develop policy in that manner is already available and would also ensure that national parks contribute not to biodiversity loss but to global healing.

The knowledge is already available. Remember, it is not scientific knowledge that was missing, but the inability to manage complexity. What is lacking is the facilitation skill to enable any government to use the available scientific knowledge to develop policy addressing the complexity. This facilitation skill can be provided by the Savory Institute, based on over half a century of work on policy analysis, development and reversing desertification restoring biodiversity. This idea, I believe, would help lead us forward and get us beyond conflict into harmony. The subsequent policy developed with the full support of the nation, as well as local and international scientists and experts, can then be considered for adoption. I propose such a test policy case be observed by major nations so that world leaders can see how team humanity can address the problem at its root cause.

Perhaps what I propose can be done under the auspices of the Royal Foundation or the Royal Society as the oldest national scientific institution in the world after they have fully investigated what I am proposing. If, as I believe will happen, the policy so developed under international observation is seen to unite humans while addressing the problem to everyone’s satisfaction, it will be beyond valuing in terms of human life or money. 

For thousands of years we did not know how to fly and many men died trying. When the Wright brothers learned to fly the human spirit flew and within 70 years we were on the moon. Now that we know what is causing climate change I believe the human spirit can fly once more offering hope for future generations.