In October, a group of investors shepherding $20 trillion in assets signed an appeal for clear, long-term policies as incentives for low-carbon economies. Later that month, a study listed the nations and mega-cities most at risk from climate impacts. Then, a report on refugees found that nations must prepare to help millions re-settle in the coming decades. The link between these headlines is climate adaptation: reconfiguring our world’s economies and policies to work under a more extreme climate. While that might seem like an old conversation, it’s not; mitigation — reducing ... Read More
Chiapas Coffee: Price, Politics and Precipitation
October 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The volatility of coffee prices over the last two decades has been the biggest challenge for farmers and cooperatives in Mexico, and may be the single greatest factor threatening to make Chiapas' tasty shade-grown coffee a "threatened species." This threat matters, beyond denying coffee drinkers a favored brew or forcing farmers to seek more lucrative crops, because, as I explained last week, the traditional methods of growing coffee plants offer huge environmental benefits for the region. But volatile prices and politics help foster mistrust, while war and climate change batter the ... Read More
Chiapas’ Coffee Growers: Accidental Environmentalists
October 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Every steaming cup of coffee could tell a story, and the shade-grown coffee from southern Mexico’s Chiapas state tells tales of a disproportionate role in sustaining local villages, hillsides, and wildlife. It’s a story with several lumps of conflict and uncertainty stirred in. The volatility of the global coffee market makes it a difficult business, and Chiapas’ small farmers face the precarious equilibrium common to all small farms and businesses. But they face an additional set of unique challenges, including the shaky political truce between the government and Zapatista rebels ... Read More
Micro-Reserves Renew Life in Oaxacan Agriculture
December 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In 2010, Mexico suffered "one of the most intense rain and hurricane seasons in its history, after having experienced, in 2009, the second-worst drought in 60 years," noted President Felipe Calderon during his opening remarks at the recent Cancun conference on climate change. How does this actually play in people's lives? Far away from Cancun, I visited a small community on the Oaxacan coast to find out. Although the municipality of San Pedro Tututepec looks like one of the many anonymous communities along the highway, it is unique in offering people hope. It is near Lagunas de Chacahua ... Read More
Saving Forests with a Sense of Place
December 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
I was in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca during one of Mexico's best-known traditions, the Day of the Dead. The somber Panteon General, Oaxaca City's largest cemetery, had been transformed into a carnival. A mariachi band played next to walls covered in candles reflecting the dead; yellow marigold flowers called cempasúchil decorated grave sites and adorned the altars that sprung up around the city. Offerings of food and drink for ancestors, who appeared in fading black-and-white photographs, were everywhere. Although part of the Catholic All Saints and All Souls days, the ... Read More