EA Best Farming Practice guide

The Environment Agency have produced a very useful guide for farmers 'Best Farming Practice' that is full of practical ideas to reduce costs and help protect the environment. A couple of farmers have told me that they think this is a very helpful guide. It has a style very similar to Farmers Weekly. Well done the EA.

Revised Code of Good Agricultural Practice

Defra have recently published 'Protecting our Water, Soil and Air: A Code of Good Agricultural Practice for farmers, growers and land managers (the ‘CoGAP’)' this useful guide integrates updated versions of the former three separate codes for water, soil and air. The publication offers practical interpretation of legislation and provides good advice on best practice; ‘good agricultural practice’ means a practice that minimises the risk of causing pollution while protecting natural resources and allowing economic agriculture to continue.

RELU workshop on Expert Systems for Natural Resource Management

Tobias Krueger (UEA) is organising a very interesting RELU Workshop on "Expert Systems For Natural Resources Management"14th January 2009. They are inviting project teams with both social and natural science interests in the development of Expert Systems to a workshop to share knowledge and experience. The workshop will explore technical issues in the design of Expert Systems and in elicitation approaches for expert knowledge.

http://www.relu.ac.uk/events/

Inter- and Transdisciplinary Problem Framing Conference

td-net for Transdisciplinary Research: Transdisciplinarity Conference 2008

This interesting conference raised and addressed the important issue of problem framing.

http://www.transdisciplinarity.ch/conference/programme08.html

Joint WMO-SECC Conference, Orlando, Florida

I'm just back from a fascinating joint conference in sunny Florida.

This was a joint meeting between the US South East Climate Consortium (SECC is a group of universities and parties interested in helping agriculture adapt to climate change), and a World Meterological Organisation Implementation/Coordination Team (WMO ICT). The WMO ICT is focused on how climate change and variability could impact natural disasters in agriculture, fisheries and forestry.

SECC is a great model of working with the industry to provide quality scientific advice and information -see for example their AgroClimate webpage

There were some excellent keynote talks and posters covering climate science capabilities, key impacts findings, and outreach and decision support. There was also a fascinating visit to the Citrus Research and Education Centre. Citrus growers in Florida face a different water quality challenge to many farmers in the UK - the soils are >90% sand and as a result, nitrogen is almost completely supplied by fertiliser. This means that protecting groundwater from leaching is a key priority.

Proceedings will be published as a USDA special report in the near future.

Weblinks:
Conference

WMO ICT

SECC

Citrus research and education centre

How good are global river flow predictions?

We recently highlighted findings on changes in future river flows predicted in a General Circulation Model (GCM). A key aspect of any predictions of future climate impacts is the skill and confidence with which they can be applied.



Recent work has investigated how river flow predictions in the Met Office Hadley Centre Global Environmental Model (HadGEM1) compare to flow gauge measurements around the world. These generally showed surprisingly good skill, given the limitations of coarse resolution and the driving GCM climate, rather than observed climate.

There is more work to be done to understand the detail - such as whether errors result from the river flow model itself, or mostly from the hydrology supplied to the model.

In addition to uncertainties in predicting observed changes, there are a number of sources of uncertainty in climate predictions which need to be addressed. With a better understanding of these uncertainties, it should be possible to develop nearer term predictions of impacts relevant to water and agriculture.

International Conference - Climate change impacts and adaptation: Dangerous rates of change

Notification of the International Conference - Climate change impacts and adaptation: Dangerous rates of change



We would like to invite you to participate in a major international conference, Climate change impacts and adaptation: Dangerous rates of change, being held at the University of Exeter on the 22-24th September.

The conference will discuss the evolving impacts of climate change and the issues of adaptation in a time of ongoing change.




Keynote speakers



Keynote speakers will include:

Dr Myles Allen - Head of the Climate Dynamics group at University of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department.
Professor Kevin Anderson - Research Director of Tyndall-Manchester Energy and Climate Change programme.
Dr Yadvinder Malhi - Professor of Ecosystem Science, Oxford University Centre for the Environment.
Professor Neil Adger - Professor in Environmental Economics, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, University of East Anglia.
Dr Pierre Friedlingstein - CNRS Senior scientist at Institut Pierre Simon-Laplace/Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (IPSL/LSCE).
Dr Hermann Held - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.


Conference Topics



We are inviting papers on the following topics:

• Improving predictions of climate change
• Climate change impacts on ecosystem services
• Climate change impacts on human and animal health
• Technology for adaptation and mitigation
• Applying earth observation to detect climate change impacts
• Policy responses and behavioural change
• Socio-economic scenarios and public understanding
• Coupled human-environment system

Submit an abstract

Abstracts must be submitted by Monday 16 June and you will be notified if you are successful from Monday 21 July. Details for the submission of Abstracts for Papers can be found on our website.


For more information and to register



Visit our website for information on the conference.

The delegate registration fee will be £200 (postgraduate students £100) and registration will close on Monday 1 September. You can register for the conference on our website.

We look forward to seeing you in September.




Professor Peter Cox
Professor of Climate System Dynamics, University of Exeter.



Dr Richard Betts
Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre.