This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

WANCHESE — At the start of year two of the United Nations’ Decade of the Ocean, the Coastal Studies Institute on the Outer Banks has merged into the emerging blue economy as part of a global scientific collaborative to harness the power of waves, currents and tides.

The Coastal Studies Institute, an outpost of the North Carolina university system renowned for its innovative coastal science, is partnered with three other East Coast academic institutions in the new Atlantic Marine Energy Center, or AMEC, one of only four National Marine Renewable Energy Centers in the country.

Although the new center is still being organized, it was officially announced in November. That’s about the same time that Scotland was hosting the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties, better known as the U.N. climate conference or COP26, which included the blue economy as a critical approach towards mitigating climate change impacts.

With its mission to support and expand sustainable renewable ocean energy, AMEC will focus on research and development.

“Us being part of that group, I think, really identifies us as a leader in the U.S. with advancing marine energy,” George Bonner, director of the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program at the Coastal Studies Institute, said in a recent interview.

Led by the University of New Hampshire, the partnership was awarded $9.7 million over four years from the U.S. Department of Energy. The institute, which is administered by East Carolina University, is also partnering with Stony Brook University in New York and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

“Really it’s about increasing collaboration on the East Coast, and the focus of the Atlantic Marine Center is on the blue economy,” Bonner said.

Blue economy is a term that broadly describes the sustainable use of marine resources to promote economic growth and social equity while reducing environmental harm.

In opening a presentation during COP26 about funding the blue economy, Peter Thomson, the U.N. secretary general’s special envoy for the ocean, characterized marine energy and other sustainable uses of ocean resources as “part of the huge revolution in technology” on a scale comparable to moving from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.

“It’s just logic, folks,” said Thomson. “Seventy percent of the planet is covered by the ocean. Ninety-five percent of the biosphere of this planet is in the ocean.”

Thomson said it will take “trillions” to fund the blue economy, but he sees it as essential to transformation of consumption and production.

‘We’re at the cusp of that time when we move from linear exploitation of finite planetary resources into an age where everything is circular, where we recycle and understand that we have to live within harmony with nature,” he said.

In December 2017, the United Nations declared 2021-2030 “The Ocean Decade,” to ensure that ocean science can underpin the U.N’s climate goals and policies.

“The Ocean Decade provides a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to create a new foundation across the science-policy interface to strengthen the management of the ocean and coasts for the benefit of humanity and to mitigate the impacts of climate change,” the U.N. said in a statement.

With its location alongside the Croatan Sound, a part of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary, the second-largest estuarine system in the nation behind the Chesapeake Bay, and within miles from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Stream, the Coastal Studies Institute is poised to be a valuable partner to advancing the blue economy. 

Bonner said that he envisions the Outer Banks institutes’ focus with AMEC will include aquaculture, seawater desalination and increasing resiliency for coastal communities.

“Our main part of this new consortium is going to be to advance our testing capability that’s at Jennette’s Pier,” he said, referring to the state-owned ocean pier in Nags Head where the institute conducts some of its renewable energy studies. “We’re going to be installing a microgrid, which will allow us to connect scale devices to a microgrid so we can validate the energy production that they’re producing.”

An important gain for the institute from the new partnership will be obtaining accreditation for its marine energy program with the assistance of an AMEC partner, the European Marine Energy Centre, or EMEC, in Orkney, Scotland.

According to the European Marine Energy Centre’s website, the center, established in 2003, is the world’s first and leading facility for demonstrating and testing technologies that generate electricity from marine energy. It has also developed international standards for marine energy and works to promote a global marine renewables industry.

Once the Coastal Studies Institute and the University of New Hampshire’s programs are accredited, Bonner said, it will help innovators and developers, especially since there are still only a few accredited so far.

“If you’re testing in an accredited program, then that helps with advancing your technology and getting investment opportunities as well,” he said. 

In April, the Waves to Water competition, sponsored by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Lab, is set to be hosted by the Coastal Studies Institute and Jennette’s Pier. The contest requires contestants to build wave-powered desalination systems that could be deployed during disasters.

Each of the four university AMEC partners have well-established marine energy programs, Martin Wosnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering and AMEC director, told Coastal Review.

“We’re going through establishing the center right now, developing the central structure, developing partnerships with industry and engaging with other marine energy efforts around the country,” he said.

Next, test sites for tidal energy conversion technologies and wave energy conversion technologies are to be established, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and off Jennette’s Pier on the Outer Banks, respectively. 

“Those facilities are key to really get technologies in the water in the correct environment at a fairly moderate cost,” Wosnik said.

For practical reasons, the locations in the ocean will allow testing at an intermediate scale, rather than full scale.

“You want to go in with something that has other meaningful scales, so you understand how it operates,” he said. “And then you can take development from there.”

The Atlantic center is also partnering with three national marine energy laboratories in the U.S., as well as the European center. While the European Marine Energy Centre is best known for its wave energy and tidal energy test sites, Wosnik said, the facility is now also getting more involved in the emerging hydrogen economy — hydrogen energy storage, fuel cell technologies — an example of how it’s looking at the bigger energy picture.

Powering the blue economy can be utility-scale marine energy, such as huge turbines deployed in arrays that produce energy that is fed to the grid, Wosnik said. But for now, it will be mostly reflected in smaller-scaled projects that provide energy to isolated communities or for emergency purposes.

“However, what we’re doing with EMEC, and at our test site, is we’re really researching all aspects of these technologies,” Wosnik said. “The center is not engaged in ‘OK, let’s find one thing that works and that’s it.’ There’s many things, many aspects of what type of technology, what type of rotors and what kind of blades work best.”

Then there are issues with corrosion, bio-fouling, operational maintenance, testing materials for resilience to the kind of loading that the ocean inflicts. What oils and lubricants are effective but not polluting?

“It’s a very turbulent environment,” he said. “There are many, many aspects that still need to be sorted out.”

But Wosnik said it’s worth remembering that wind energy, which is now cheaper than fossil fuels, was hardly on anyone’s radar 20 or 30 years ago.

The marine energy industry in the U.S. has been held back by the lack of test sites that allow inexpensive trials and provide in-water experience, he said. And that’s not including the costs for analytical and computer modeling and laboratory analysis and other work that’s required before the onsite testing.

“There’s a lot of work that leads up to maturing technologies to be ready to be tested in open water,” Wosnik said.

With the Department of Energy support, and a global network of researchers and scientists to collaborate with, the timing for diving into the blue economy may be fortuitous. 

“I would say that we are about to get serious about marine energy,” Wosnik said. “That’s really what’s happening right now.”

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

PLYMOUTH — As warnings about the need to immediately and drastically cut carbon emissions were blaring full volume at November’s 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP26, climate summit in Scotland, talk of carbon markets suddenly filled airwaves and the Internet sites. And agriculture was named as the logical vehicle to sell carbon credits.

Carbon trading has been around since 2005 as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate carbon’s effect on global warming, but it’s grown in fits and starts. As authorized by governments, an entity would be allowed to emit an agreed-upon amount of carbon dioxide in exchange for credits that had been purchased — say, from a farmer — to offset the carbon pollution.  Rules for global carbon trading were formalized at COP26. 

Ronnie W. “Ron” Heiniger, associate professor at North Carolina State University and professor and cooperative extension corn specialist at the Vernon G. James Research and Extension Center in Plymouth who has worked with farmers in the region for 28 years, recently elaborated on the labyrinth facing farmers in figuring the value of carbon credits, while they’re contending with numerous other climate challenges.

Corn and other crops absorb tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, he told Coastal Review. Satellite images of eastern North Carolina in the summertime show that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere above its farm fields go down quite dramatically as the crops absorb the greenhouse gas.

“And you would think that was a great deal,” Heiniger said. “The problem, of course, is that we lose some of that CO2 that was absorbed into the plant. As the plants decay, they release some of that back into the atmosphere.”

Also, with tilling, the microbes in the soil survive by eating organic molecules, and they release carbon dioxide, he said. “They have to respire, just like human beings.”

Plus, a lot of the soils in the region are peat, which can be 50% carbon.

“Anytime you disturb those, some of the carbon is released,” Heiniger said. “So the issue here is how do we get this carbon that we captured in this crop to stay in the soil.”

With more talk of sequestering carbon, and no-till methods and cover crops, which can encourage a longer growing season, and fewer fallow or bare fields, the concept of selling carbon credits to offset things like oil and gas projects is a possibility. But, he said, it’s not only farmers who are skeptical, so are researchers at N.C. State.

“We’re concerned about this concept of carbon credits because we want to make sure what you’re getting paid for is actually happening,” he said. “The issue is the science needs to be better developed for how much carbon is sequestered and what practices are best for doing it. Those issues still remain to be answered from this mitigation side.”

Cover crops, which involve seeding fields with some kind of grass as a crop is being harvested, with the goal of growing biomass to cover the land. But the practice also creates conundrums. Although it can keep down the need for herbicides by suppressing weeds, as well as protect soil, the cover has to be removed when planting season returns. And the way it’s removed is through chemicals — or plowing it into the soil.

Heiniger said that records over the years reflect a steady increase since the mid-1990s in the number of days at or above 95 degrees, and changes in insect populations and the types of insects that affect crops. There is also increased saltwater intrusion in some low areas. Some of the saltwater is coming up from the groundwater, which presents an even more difficult situation than that coming in from the canals that can be blocked or flushed.

But the rain has become a huge headache.

“The intensity of these storms — that definitely has caught our attention, Heiniger said. “We get more of these 6-. 8-, 10-,12-inch rainfalls than we did close to 30 years ago, when I started here.”

Floodwaters are staying in fields for longer times, suffocating crops.

“And as I tell farmers, when your soil is saturated, that means there’s no oxygen in there,” he explained. “It’s like being in a drought because basically the crop can’t take up water, even though it’s sitting in water. So, it can’t cool itself. It’s basically like you’re in a desert then.”

Heiniger said that the drainage systems — pumps and canals — are critical infrastructure to farmers, although public funds are not provided to maintain them.

Changes in the climate converging with growing resistance to pesticides have led to an increasing problem with stinkbugs, which are better suited to warmer temperatures, he said. And there has been increased damage from bugs in corn, soybeans and cotton.

Heiniger said that corn is the largest crop in northeastern North Carolina by acreage, followed closely by soybeans and cotton a distant third.

Much of the corn grown in the region is used to feed livestock, which provides a more favorable economic return, he explained. The type of corn has also been bred to be more stress-tolerant.

The skyrocketing cost of fertilizer is leading farmers to switch to growing more soybeans, which require less nitrogen, Heiniger said. They also take steps to conserve fertilizer, using less of it, changing the timing and increasing the root system.

As a result of rising costs, he said, farmers will plant less corn, so there will be less corn in the market, and prices will be higher.

Since the 1960s or so, farms in northeastern North Carolina were generally larger than the rest of the state, and they’ve gotten bigger over time. Equipment costs have also gotten bigger — a combine can run about a half-million dollars.

“It’s like owning a beach house,” Heiniger said, chuckling. “You’ve got to get bigger to make that pay.”

Most of the small farms on the sand ridges that had been farmed since the 1600s have been consolidated now into bigger farms, or they’re leased or managed by big farms. But whatever the size of the farm, mitigation methods, including no-till and cover crops, are very early in the development stage.

“Not that we haven’t done cover crops, or that we haven’t done no-till, it’s just that we haven’t put together a system that tries to use all of these to do this,” he said.

Although cover crops can save money otherwise spent on herbicides, the technique is regarded as uneconomical because a farmer is planting something that can’t be harvested. But carbon credits would have the potential to compensate farmers to plant cover crops.

Heiniger said it would probably take up to five years for scientists to develop a strategy that promoted the maximum amount of carbon being returned. Typically, it takes at least three years of ground studies to confirm a practice as viable, and then another couple of years to introduce it to farmers or growers.

N.C. State has started programs looking at cover crops and reduced tillage systems, but more information on carbon sequestering requires soil sampling, testing and data analysis — and the money to do the work.

“We need more funding if we’re going to make progress,” he said. “As you see, agriculture is the linchpin here. They could talk all they wanted on TV about how they’re going to be climate neutral. They’re depending on these credits, and agriculture is it.”

Is agriculture able to participate yet in carbon markets?

“The answer is no,” Heiniger said. “Right now, we’re not ready.”

Once the wrinkles are smoothed out, he fully expects that farmers will be willing participants, including those who are climate change skeptics. It’s the “doomsday scenarios” mixed in with the science that puts them off, he explained. That and unrealistic talk about such fantastical things as electric tractors, which could not — at least with current technology — provide the concentrated power that’s necessary to run such heavy equipment.

“Farmers know climate is changing,” he said. “Farmers understand we adapt, you figure out how to get it done, you mitigate, you find systems that cool the crop or reduce that runoff area and get that water off quicker. You find ways to solve those problems.

“I think that’s what hurts the climate change thing, is that we end up talking about things that are speculative rather than concrete,” Heiniger said. “Farmers see the environment — they don’t talk about it. They farm it.”

Next: Harnessing the ocean’s energy

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

Agriculture is a major industry in North Carolina, as well as an important source of food for the U.S.

In 2020, according to Carolina Demography, soybeans were North Carolina’s most valuable crop, at $674 million. Corn was the second-most valuable, at $483 million. Ranked third were the state’s famed sweet potatoes, valued at about $375 million, a 15.7% increase from 2019 ($324 million).

******

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report on climate change and land released in 2019 reveals complex and often little understood dynamics between land, plants and water in a rapidly warming planet.

Related: Climate solutions may rely on farms, but technology lags

Findings include the following:

• About 25% of the mitigation of their carbon contributions pledged by nations in the 2015 Paris Agreement are land-based options, including soil carbon sequestration, agricultural management and bioenergy, as well as reduced deforestation and forest sinks   
• Between 21% to 37% of total greenhouse gas emissions are related to the food system, from agriculture to transport to processing to consumption. Of that, 9-14% of emissions are from crop and livestock activities, and 5-14% come from land use and land use change such as peatland degradation and deforestation. An additional 5-10% are from supply chain activities, including food loss and food waste.

Suggested mitigation tactics include the following:

• Reduction in crop and livestock emissions and modifications in food choices.
• Sequestering carbon in soils and biomass and reducing fertilizer emissions.
• Combined supply-side and demand-side actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance food system resilience.
• Conditions to enable adaptation and risk-sharing created and supported through public policies and incentives.

“Such combined measures can enable the implementation of large-scale land-based adaptation and mitigation strategies without threatening food security from increased competition for land for food production and higher food prices,” the report said. “Without combined food system measures in farm management, supply chains, and demand, adverse effects would include increased numbers of malnourished people and impacts on smallholder farmers.”

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The North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, released in June 2020, examines the climate change picture for the state.  

Findings include the following:

• The water cycle is intensifying, resulting in more severe flooding and drought.
• Rainfall patterns are changing, with heavy rain falling in once-dry places and likely increased precipitation in high latitudes.
• Continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century in coastal areas will contribute to increased shoreline erosion and more severe and frequent flooding in low-lying areas.
• Extreme flood events that used to happen once a century could occur every year by 2100.
• Intense rain deluges combined with inadequate storm drainage infrastructure increase vulnerability of inland communities to flooding, putting them at more risk of suffering economic and agricultural losses.
• Natural areas and productive land within the state’s interior counties could be impacted by more frequent flooding, resulting in losses of habitats, fisheries and protective buffers in local communities.
• Groundwater and surface waters will become more vulnerable to contamination from saltwater intrusion caused by rising seas, changing salinity levels in estuarine communities.
• Increased saltwater intrusion due to sea level rise is expected to convert lower coastal floodplains from swamp forest to wetlands.
• Freshwater that is affected by saltwater intrusion could cause crop yields to decline and make farmland unsuitable for growing crops, in addition to leaving less available freshwater for agriculture.
• Expected elevated night-time temperatures will have outsized negative impacts on agriculture and forestry due to disruptions in plant physiology.

The report’s climate change recommendations for land include the following:

• Farm and forest assets must be protected by adaptive capacities, technologies, equipment, crops and strategies. Experienced and trained personnel will be necessary to address the increasing climate change hazards.
• More research and development is needed to create adaptive varieties and species for crops and animals to increase heat resistance.
• Regenerative practices need to be developed to sequester carbon in farmlands, pocosin and forests. Also, improvements in manure management on farms is required to prevent greenhouse gas emissions.
• Protection of the state’s endemic species with adaptive management is a necessary responsibility.
• Pocosin and peatlands must be restored and/or enhanced in order to prevent soil loss and wildfire risk.

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

GLASGOW, Scotland — At its essence, agriculture is science, and food is fuel. But it’s the farmer and the cook who transform each, respectively, into creative human endeavors that serve as scaffolding for society and culture. 

The 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP26, cited the interconnection of global agriculture with our global food system as one of the most critical climate issues facing humanity.

Global agriculture has suffered a productivity loss of 21% in the last 60 years as a result of climate change, yet global food production must increase 56% over 2010 levels to meet the needs of the world’s population in 2050.

That alarming assessment was part of what’s behind ClimateShot, a campaign to transform agricultural innovation featured in November during the global climate summit COP26.

Also described as the “global action agenda for innovation in agriculture,” the effort is intended to drive creative solutions with an alliance from food, farm and climate sectors. But the convergence of climate change issues in just northeastern North Carolina farms indicates the complexity of the challenges.

“A ClimateShot would make food systems more sustainable and climate-smart,” according to material about the program provided at the conference. “Such innovation will make sustainable agriculture more affordable, attractive and more widely adapted than unsustainable practices around the world by 2030, to the benefit of people, nature and the planet.”

It’s not that agriculture as an industry hasn’t tapped cutting-edge techniques, such as drones to GPS on tractors to satellite tracking that can monitor and test soils and rainfall and crops, but more nature-based practices are needed to mitigate the effects of agriculture on the climate, Robert Beach, a research fellow in agricultural, resource and energy economics and policy program at RTI International in Raleigh, told Coastal Review at COP26.

“Farmers tend to be a group that doesn’t tend to believe in climate change,” he said. “Sort of ironically, farmers are potentially one of the more affected groups.”

Beach, who grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania, said he understands why people in a profession that has constantly adapted to weather and changing conditions would be skeptical. But as a scientist, he also appreciates the urgent need for agriculture to adopt new climate-friendly practices.

“Fertilizer is one of the biggest sources of nitrogen oxide in the world,” he said, referring to a top greenhouse gas culprit that can also cause dead zones and algal blooms in water bodies.

But some of the new farm machinery can access data that allows fertilizer to be applied more precisely to the needs of the crop.

“Potentially, they can save money and avoid over-application and reduce some of the runoff,” Beach said.

No doubt, agriculture has gotten more efficient, he said, but more climate-smart tactics will be required for productive and sustainable farms into the future. For instance, scientists could solve lots of challenges by creating seeds for plants that are salt-tolerant and adaptable to different conditions. 

“I guess that’s the silver bullet,” Beach said. “It doesn’t need fertilizer and it grows no matter what.” 

Jeff Sparks, president of the Blacklands Farm Managers Association, said that since about 2014, the northeast region has been pummeled by storms that come more frequently and dump record amounts of rain. Based in Washington, in Beaufort County, the group was established in 1970 to represent farmers in Beaufort, Hyde, Tyrrell, Washington and, later, Carteret counties. The group currently has about 500 paying members.

Sparks, who runs Green Valley Farms in Columbia, in Tyrrell County, said that the flooding in the last nine years or so has hurt the farm economy in the region. 

“It doesn’t really matter what farm prices are … if prices are cheap or high,” he told Coastal Review. “If you have nothing to sell, you know, you still have nothing.” 

But with more moderate weather during the last two years, farmers have been able to build back some of the lost capital.

Besides increased numbers and intensity of rain events, Sparks said there has also been issues of saltwater intrusion in some low-lying lands in Tyrrell and Hyde counties, But still, he’s not jumping on the climate change bandwagon.

“I think we’ve got climate cycles and if you go back and look at 2,000 to 3,000 years of history, it’ll show you that the climate runs in cycles. You know, hot wet spells, cool wet spells. So, I don’t know if we have anything majorly changing,” he said. “The way I view a lot of this is that man didn’t build this world and man’s not going to tear it up. So that’s just the way I look at it. The good Lord is in charge of it, whatever happens, happens.”

At the same time, Sparks is not in denial about the effects of warming temperatures — such as how thunderstorms build higher and hold more water — or the unique challenges facing his region.

“If we go back and look at all of our history and our scientific maps and everything, we’re talking whether it be climate change or climate cycles, the ocean here used to back toward the Rocky Mount way,” he said. “They’ve got evidence. Even where we are, we dig down 20 foot deep, and we’ll find seashells.

“Maybe one day this might be water. We don’t know. It’s just so many things we don’t understand. Some of these scientists we got, I get a little aggravated sometimes, I say we know more about up there where the stars and moon is than we do right here under our own feet. You know, there’s a ton to learn here, but it seems like we don’t want to.”

With elevation in the five counties ranging from 30 feet above sea level at the highest, and about 3 feet below sea level at its lowest, miles of canals and numerous drainage districts crisscross the lands. Farmers are trying to adapt to more floods and higher groundwater levels by building dikes higher and putting more pumps in to get the water out, Sparks said.

In the more isolated areas such as in Tyrrell, he said, they can pump water straight up to the Alligator River, but areas toward Washington county, drainage districts are more common, since water has to flow through the properties of multiple landowners.

Some of the older gentlemen in their 80s who have fished their entire lives in the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds and the ocean seem to think, he said, that the ocean hasn’t really risen, at least compared to the inland waters.

“They’re saying with all these big rain events we’ve had in the last 10 years that a lot of the sediment from upstream — Raleigh way, Virginia way — has filled these channels in and the water can’t get out of here. When the tide backs in, it just stays in forever.”

That means that the canals would have to be dredged to improve drainage, which Sparks said should be the responsibility of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issue was raised about three years ago by the association, which had hired a water drainage management specialist. They met twice with then-state Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan, who is now the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“We thought we were really making some headway and trying to get stuff done, and well, then the world fell apart last year, and everything’s just been kind of forgotten about,” he said. “I think we’ve got some good momentum to move forward with it, once we get everything kind of behind us.”

Although the region’s black soil is rich and productive, the floods have taken a toll.

“There used to be a lot of vegetable crops in this area — sweet corn, cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce — and it really kind of faded out whenever the heavy rains started 10 years ago. And then you were just losing everything.”

They’re still growing corn and wheat and soybeans. Vegetable crops have been mainly moved up to the sandier regions around Chowan County that drains better but can also be irrigated if needed.

But he said that it seems that the scientists working on crop genetics and engineering are breeding plants that can cope with drought stress and dry conditions.

“They’re not really pushing for anything that can grow in 80-inches-of-rain-a-year environments,” he said. “I mean, that’s one of our issues.”

Sparks said that he has told some of the agricultural experts he has talked with at numerous meetings that they need to develop crops that can handle saturated soils for prolonged periods.

“You know, when they go back and look at the bulk of the crop area in the U.S. or the world, it’s like less than 5% is probably this way. The other 95% is facing dry issues more so than wet issues,” he said.

But the farmers are open to trying new crops — past ideas about growing hemp or mustard seed for biofuel never materialized — and innovations, as long as they can make a living.

Some innovations, such as a 2021 study that showed that covering 4,000 miles of irrigation canals in California with solar panels would save 65 billion gallons of water annually from evaporating while generating power on land that is already being used, may someday be adaptable to North Carolina farmlands, he said.

And cover crops to reduce insects and protect soil are starting to be used more.

In a normal season with moderate rain, cover crops could cut the need for one or two herbicide applications, he said. Overall, pesticides and herbicides are not working as well, and farmers are rotating their crops more than they used to and managing nutrient applications.

Fertilizer went up 600% this year, he said. In November 2020, a ton of nitrogen cost about $170. Today, it’s about $625 a ton. And it’s predicted to go up another $200 by spring.

As is the nature of the profession, farmers are trying to figure things out as they continue working.

“I know there’s all these carbon credits. So much of that, nobody knows. Everybody explains it, (but) it’s like the Wild, Wild West.”

One challenge, he said, is measuring carbon while taking into account offsets for energy and nitrogen fertilizers used to grow the crop.

“So you know, that’s kind of a Catch-22 that we’re not sure about,” he said. “We’re in a sustainability fad, and every company and organization had to have a certificate or a plan for sustainability. The beef industry, the pork industry, the corn industry, soybeans — the whole group has spent billions, I’d say, in the last seven or eight years to come up with this because this is what the consumer wants, and (what) the world wants. So, this is what we’re trying to do. And I think this carbon credit thing is kind of following suit.”

Beach, the RTI scientist, agreed that the carbon credits being used to offset carbon dioxide produced elsewhere are complex.

“Agriculture is heterogeneous,” Beach explained. “If they’re paying for a credit, they’re going to want to know what it’s for. Even within a farm, there’s some variation in terms of how much of a difference you’ve done in the past. In some land, you may get different sequestration

There’s been a lot of work, but we still need to understand the effect on yields, emissions, sequestration, cost of production. Different parts of the world will have different conditions.”

Meanwhile, farmers in northeastern North Carolina are trying to cope with getting through 2022.

“Budgets for next year are looking really tight,” Sparks said. “Even with the price of grain that you sell it for, if you have an average to above average year, you can pencil out a little profit. “But if you have a year where you have some of these storms return like we had in 2019 and ’18 and ’16, it’s not going to be a good situation for a lot of folks.”

Next: The science of agriculture

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

GLASGOW, Scotland — Until this year, methane hadn’t received the attention it deserved for being a huge source of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, despite being nearly as much to blame as carbon for overheating the planet.

Last month when the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland elevated awareness of its danger to the global stage, the world was left wondering what to do about methane emitted not just from gas pipes, but also from landfills, food waste, agricultural operations and livestock.

“We’ve been working on methane for over a decade,” Fred Krupp, president of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in an interview at the “Methane Moment” pavilion at the climate summit, also known as COP26, shorthand for the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, nearly 200 nations that agreed to a climate pact in 1992. “This is the first time the issue has become prominent.”

Still, he said that the total amount of methane released in the atmosphere is only an estimate because of the difficulty not only capturing it, but measuring it. For instance, most of livestock-generated methane, a major global contributor, is dispersed from the mouths and intestines of cattle, not their manure, presenting an obvious challenge. But recent technological advances, he said, are now making it possible to precisely measure the gas detected in the air, and technology to enable its use as fuel in some conditions has become more affordable.

“Methane from the animals is basically the same as natural gas — biogas,” he said. “You can feed it into a pipeline, but it can also produce electricity on site.”

On Nov. 2, the Biden administration pledged numerous measures to address climate change impacts, including incentive-based approaches to reducing methane emissions with alternative manure management systems and expansion of on-farm generation and use of alternative energy. The U.S. and European Union had earlier announced a 90-nation pact to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030 from 2020 levels.

If methane emissions are stopped, there quickly would be positive results.

“Dollar for dollar,” Krupp said, “this is the most effective way to bring temperatures down.”

But it won’t be easy.

In North Carolina alone, mitigating a significant source of methane emissions — hog farms — by installation of biogas technology involves diving into longstanding social and environmental justice issues, multiple legal challenges, controversial permitting and accusations of broken agreements and lopsided financial benefits.

Hog waste from thousands of swine operations in the state is flushed from barns into what are essentially dirt pits, most of them unlined and uncovered. After sitting and “digesting” for a while, the slurry is sprayed onto nearby cropland. Depending on wind direction or whims of the sprayer, residents have complained that the residue has all too frequently coated their homes and filled the air they breathe with retched smells and toxic fumes that burn their eyes and create multiple health problems.

Municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, about 15.1% of total emissions in 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Climate scientists say that although methane accounts for about 10% of human-caused greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it accounts for 30% of climate change impacts. The gas has a disproportionate destructive effect: a ton of methane in the atmosphere creates about 80 times more warming than a ton of carbon dioxide emissions. But it doesn’t stick around as long as carbon.

“Methane dissipates,” Michelle Nowlin, co-director or the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Duke University School of Law, explained in a recent interview. “I think it’s like on a 20-year timescale, whereas carbon dioxide may take a 100-year timescale, but the power that it packs in that 20 years is significantly greater than what the carbon does over that longer timeframe. So it’s a much shorter term, much more intense contribution to global warming than the carbon dioxide itself.”

North Carolina has no fracking facilities, and limited natural gas pipeline infrastructure, but the waste from millions of pigs emits enormous amounts of methane — and it’s a lot more complicated to measure and capture than what leaks from a pipe.

The 2,300 or so swine concentrated animal feeding operations operating in North Carolina today are a big reason that the state is a “leading contributor” of methane emissions in the country, Nowlin said. In addition, the state’s industrial animal operations also include large numbers of turkey and chicken farms. 

Nowlin, who has worked on numerous hog waste management issues for close to 25 years, co-authored with Emily Spiegel a chapter in a research book published in 2017 on climate change and agricultural law, wrote that about 30% of agriculture’s total contribution to greenhouse gases is from the livestock sector.

“Despite the significant role the livestock industry plays in greenhouse gas emissions, it has thus far evaded regulation in the US,” the authors wrote. “Instead, approaches to reducing livestock greenhouse gas emissions have been voluntary, incentive-based, and wholly inadequate to the scale and urgency of the problem.

“As we seek ways to lower greenhouse gas emissions and forestall the effects of global climate change, we must remove the protections long afforded the agricultural industry and adapt existing regulatory tools to address its contributions,” they wrote.

Dominion Energy and Smithfield Foods Inc. are currently proposing to build what they call “North Carolina’s largest renewable natural gas project” through their joint venture, Align Renewable Natural Gas.

Planned in Duplin and Sampson counties, the project would generate enough energy to power more than 3,500 homes, according to an August 2019 press release on Smithfield’s website. The technology involves covering the lagoons to trap methane that is then processed and converted to biogas, which is injected into existing natural gas distribution pipes. The company is also proposing to create biogas from its hog slaughterhouse in Bladen County.

Swine waste-to-energy techniques have gained support from proponents who say they address the environmental concern with methane emissions while creating an additional revenue stream and saving and/or creating jobs.  

But Derb Carter, director of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s North Carolina office, which among other legal actions has challenged permits that the state Department of Environmental Quality issued for the project, said that capping the lagoons would increase the amount of harmful nutrients in the liquified waste, and have an even worse impact on water quality.

“Numerous studies have tied the lagoon and spray-field system to increased nutrient levels that plague our coastal waters, leading to periodic algal blooms and fish kills,” Carter wrote in a December 2020 editorial, adding that Smithfield has for two decades declined to install environmentally superior systems, despite an agreement with the state attorney general to do so.

“As Smithfield has requested,” he wrote, “the state can allow Smithfield to simply cover lagoons, capture and profit from biogas, and perpetuate the flawed lagoon and sprayfield system.”

For residents along coastal North Carolina, the hog lagoons and their methane emissions may seem like a distant concern. For those that remember Hurricane Floyd in 1999, when floodwaters inundated the open pits and drowned thousands of hogs and sent the pig filth and tons of putrid sediment and floating carcasses toward the sounds and ocean in a pink-purple swath of polluted water, the concern may seem valid.

“Because even though they’re not right there on the coast, a large number of those operations are present in the coastal counties and that coastal plain,” Nowlin said. “And of course, to the extent that it’s deposited on the lands and waters of eastern North Carolina along the coast, and at the coast’s back door, and all the waste that runs off into those waters gets carried to the coast and to the sounds.

“That’s why we have nutrient pollution in the Albemarle-Pamlico sounds,” she added. “So it’s a significant issue for people on the coast, even if they don’t recognize it being so because it’s not right in their backyard.”

Methane is just one of the pollutants from hog lagoons, and biogas production — so far — offers an imperfect and inadequate solution.

As far as global warming, Nowlin said that ammonia, another byproduct of hog waste, is also a problem because when that ammonia is emitted into the atmosphere it combines with nitrogen gas and oxygen to create nitrous oxide, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas.

According to a 2020 study “Reconciling Environmental Justice with Climate Change Mitigation: A Case Study of NC Swine CAFOs,” co-authored by Ryke Longest, clinical professor of law, Duke Law School, and co-director of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and D. Lee Miller, lecturing fellow of law at Duke Law School, the “confinement, consolidation and concentration” of hogs in the concentrated animal feeding operations, which are located in 10 counties in the coastal plain, has caused a multitude of negative impacts to the environment and the health of nearby communities. 

The state’s hog industry is one of the largest in the United States, and according to the report, the swine slaughter facility in Tar Heel, in Bladen County, is the world’s largest. To illustrate the dramatic change the industry has made in the state, the authors said that there were about 11,000 small swine farms throughout North Carolina in 1982.  Between 1989 and 1995, they said, 700 CAFOs housing as many as 8.2 million hogs were built, and 7,000 small hog farms went out of business.

“The new mega-facilities are concentrated in a handful of socially and environmentally vulnerable communities in the Coastal Plain where the most prominent geological features are sandy soils, high water tables, and proximity to the coast,” the report said.

The CAFOs, the Duke researchers say, have created pollution and diminished the quality of life of communities. Lagoons break down the contents of the waste and turn it into polluting gases, and the liquid waste seeps into groundwater and runs off into waterways.

“Now, as global concern over climate change drives corporate demand to decarbonize supply chains, market forces exert pressure for converting existing lagoon and spray field CAFOs into biogas factories,” Longest and Miller wrote. “Biogas mitigates greenhouse gas emissions by combusting methane into CO2 while generating revenue from electricity sales and carbon offset credits.

“Reconciling the interests of environmental justice, local natural resources, and the global climate requires agribusiness to reinvest some of this financial boon into the clean technologies they have promised — and shirked — for decades.”

Next in the series: A coastal North Carolina farmer’s perspective.

This column is to introduce a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held earlier this month.

GLASGOW, Scotland — At a global event the size of the 26^th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP26, North Carolina was barely a blip.

Numerous people, even those from Western Europe and (gasp!) England, seemed to know little about our state, including the location of our famously angled Outer Banks coastline.

“It’s where the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is,” I said confidently. 

“Ummmm.”

“It’s where the English first attempted to colonize America.”

Polite smiles. “Oh?”

“It’s where the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.”

“Ahhh!”

Of course, how much do we Americans know about the coasts of other nations, or even our own country? And yes, there were some Americans I spoke with at the conference who had no idea where the Outer Banks, and even North Carolina, were located.

During the Oct. 31-Nov. 12 summit, which opened ceremoniously on Nov. 3 with speeches from President Joe Biden and other world leaders, North Carolina was merely part of the U.S that shares the alarming global impacts from a changing climate: rising and warming seas, hotter summers, intensifying rain and wind during storms.

As is the case in the rest of the world, wildfires, flooding and drought are likely part of North Carolina’s tomorrow because they’re part of North Carolina’s today and yesterday. It’s just a matter of timing and degrees.

Every state, every region, every nation, has different levels of threat, but judging from the breadth of attendees at the conference, every corner of the world feels under threat, whether current or looming. 

And on the periphery, most of the world has been stressed by the prolonged pandemic, divisive politics and an uneven economy. In a word, that is the value of such global events: connection. Traveling is humbling and enlightening at the same time, but more importantly, it breaks us out of the enclosed room of our lives.

Even in the other world-ness of a sprawling mini-city of the COP, participants, observers, journalists were joined in a collective, sprinting from hub to hub for conferences, presentations and meetings, in several different “zones,” which often added up to many city blocks of distance. One man shared that another participant had told him that he had walked 30,000 steps the previous day, which adds up to about 15 miles.

Big screens in the Action Zone — where a large blue Earth hovered over an expansive gathering area filled with tables and chairs and lined with broadcast areas and small meeting rooms — displayed interviews taking part on a stage. 

On Monday, Nov. 8., the room was abuzz about former President Barack Obama’s visit, which took place in another area where people had lined up to grab limited seats to watch in person. International press coverage of Obama’s speech was glowing, making our former president the big hit of the summit. Two days earlier, more than 100,000 marchers filled the streets in Glasgow, led by climate activist Greta Thunberg and other young people, to demand substantial and urgent action on climate change.

The second week concentrated on the meat and potatoes of the negotiations, which focused on finding consensus among global participants with disparate wealth, resources, populations, vulnerability, impacts and emissions contributions. Indigenous members of tiny island nations worked shoulder to shoulder with powerful representatives of wealthy nations into the night hours seeking solutions.

During the week, U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry could be seen dashing down long hallways, trailed by reporters. Kerry was also an active negotiator at the 2015 COP21 in Paris, when he was Obama’s secretary of state. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, several Congress members and 13 cabinet secretaries also showed up — Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg attended remotely — with some of their images flashing spectrally on various screens throughout the conference. 

On Nov. 13, after days of intense negotiations, an agreement was announced. Hammered out by diplomats representing about 200 nations, the parties pledged to return next year to strengthen limits on greenhouse gas emissions and to encourage richer nations to double funds to help developing countries cope with the impacts of climate change.

It was an imperfect conclusion to the ambitious two-week gathering that hosted about 30,000 attendees from all over the world, including North Carolina scientists from Duke University and RTI International, among others.

In Glasgow, Biden had characterized the meeting as the world’s “last chance” to save the planet from the impacts of climate change. World leaders at the start had set a goal to reduce emissions enough to cap global temperatures increases at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels.

Biden pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030, reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

But even with the nations’ new pledges and targets to reduce fossil-fuel emissions and limit deforestation, warming is projected to be 2.1 degrees Celsius, or 3.78 degrees Fahrenheit, by 2100, according to research group Climate Action Tracker. 

At the U.S. pavilion at the conference, a big interactive map provided by Climate Central, a scientific data research group invited attendees to enter their hometown location to see the impact of sea level rise under different scenarios. Nags Head, where I live, was shockingly blue under the higher emission projection.

Despite falling short of the initial goal, the summit harnessed unanimity between global leaders that more must be done to prevent climate disaster. And compared with Paris’ significant, but at times aspirational, climate pledges, the Scotland agreement included more realistic rules meant to provide more transparency and accountability in tracking countries’ actions.

“It’s meek, it’s weak and the 1.5 Celsius goal is only just alive, but a signal has been sent that the era of coal is ending,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, described the climate deal to the New York Times Nov. 13. “And that matters.”

US, global commitments

The following actions were announced during the summit:

• The Biden administration pledged carbon-pollution free electricity production by 2035 and to permit 25 gigabytes of renewable energy on public lands by 2025.

• The U.S. Department of the Interior committed to develop offshore wind projects, with a goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.

• The U.S. State Department announced that an agreement with the European Union and partners had been launched to reduce global methane emissions. The Global Methane Pledge represents more than 100 countries and 70% of the global economy as well as about half of the human-produced methane emissions.

• COP26 negotiators also created new trade standards under Article 6, a provision of the 2015 agreement from the Paris climate conference that deals with carbon credits. The updated standard includes more transparency on selling and trading of carbon offsets.

• About 130 countries collectively promised billions of dollars to stop deforestation by 2030, and dozens of nations pledged to phase out coal power and sales of vehicles that use gasoline.

• For the first time, the COP agreement included a vow to “phase down” coal power and government subsidies for oil and gas.

• The U.S. joined the COP26 High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, or “Ocean Panel,” a multinational initiative focused on harnessing the power of the ocean to reduce emissions, provide jobs and food security, improve climate resilience and sustain biological diversity, according to a U.S. State Department press release.