How Plantations International is Combating Climate Change with Sustainable Agricultural Practices: As guardians of large tracts of plantations, Plantations International operates to rigid forestry stewardship standards, ensuring the plantations are managed to strict environmental and social criteria ensuring we are cognizant of our responsibility towards environment protection in ensuring the sustainability of not only our business but also the larger community around us. Through best agricultural practices, we believe our operations present excellent opportunities for economic maximisation and environmental footprint minimization. We are committed to managing land and plantations in a way that keeps illegal logging, forest fires and poor farming practices at bay. We are also determined to increase environmental productivity, from land delineated for agricultural and conservation purposes to resource management.
Why Agriculture? Agriculture has become an attractive investment destination for a number of reasons. Most important of all being the strong market fundamentals in support of the sector on both the demand and supply side. An increasing population, changing demographics, reductions in arable land and climate change have led to an urgent need of more productive methods of growing food. Food and agriculture as an asset class falls under the broad investment category of real assets which are physical in nature and provide hard tangible ownership. Real assets broadly include commodities, property, infrastructure, timberland and agriculture also classified as farmland. Agriculture as a sector has been rising in prominence over the past decade reaching over 8 USD trillion in value.
Despite multiple definitions for food security there are common themes or indicators that tend to appear and underline its characterization. These include food affordability, food availability and accessibility, food quality and safety, and existing natural resources. The FAO and The Economist both measure food security on a country based on these indicators at varying degrees. Furthermore, low levels of food security place significant stress on government expenditures. It forces governments to invest substantial resources in the short-term through social safety net programs and conditional cash transfers. It also increases their reliance on food imports which is detrimental to long term food self-sufficiency. The FAO has reported that high rates of malnutrition can lead to a GDP loss of as much as 4-5%.
With offices, plantations, and representatives across Asia, Europe, and Africa, Plantations International is a multinational plantation and farm management company that specializes in providing sustainable agricultural and forestry or “agroforestry” management services for its clients. Plantations International has clients ranging from private individuals to large landholders and corporate investors. We put teamwork, innovation, and our passion for creating “Ethical & Sustainable Capital” at the heart of everything we do.
Food insecurity occurs due to a variety of factors which are becoming increasingly more challenging to combat. Conflict and violence in many parts of the world can lead to food insecurity as so does climate variability and exposure to more complex, frequent and intense climate extremes. By 2050, the world’s population is expected to reach 9.6 billion and unfortunately while populations grow Earth’s surface does not. Global demand for food by 2050 will be 70% greater than it is today which requires addressing a number of key global food security challenges. Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2. Developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while in middle- and high-income regions, food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher.
Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can even trap more heat than CO2. A molecule of methane produces more than 20 times the warming of a molecule of CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2. Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons (which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer), have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their concentrations are much lower than CO2, none of these gases adds as much warmth to the atmosphere as CO2 does. In order to understand the effects of all the gases together, Plantations International scientists tend to talk about all greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. Since 1990, yearly emissions have gone up by about 6 billion metric tons of “carbon dioxide equivalent” worldwide, more than a 20% increase. Plantations International is already seeing some of these changes occurring more quickly than they had expected. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eleven of the twelve hottest years since thermometer readings became available occurred between 1995 and 2006.