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maybe not</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">How does your garden grow?<br>
<i>UCSB research professor David Cleveland and his students model the
effect of household gardens on greenhouse gas
emissions</i></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA
BARBARA</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">PUBLIC
RELEASE: 7-SEP-2016</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br></font></div>
<div><font
face="Lucida Grande"
>=======================================================</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">"It's important not to get hung
up on assumptions that small and local are always better,"
Cleveland said. "They may not be. You have to keep your eye on
the real goal and not get tripped up by intermediate
steps.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">"This study shows that in terms
of effect on the climate, small things matter," he added.
"How much attention you pay to the garden matters. How
efficiently the vegetables are produced and consumed
matters."</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">=====================</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">Turning lawn into a vegetable garden
can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study by UC
Santa Barbara research professor David Cleveland.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
Using a lifecycle assessment model, Cleveland and his students
demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions can be cut by 2 kilograms
for every kilo of homegrown vegetable when compared to the
store-bought counterpart. The group's findings appear in the
journal<i> Landscape and Urban Planning</i>.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
For their baseline scenario, the researchers modeled a vegetable
garden based on converting an area of lawn to garden, replacing some
conventionally produced purchased vegetables with ones from the garden
and diverting some household organic waste and gray water from
processing facilities for use as compost and water for the
garden.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
The researchers chose midrange numbers from the wide range of values
in the existing data. They also conducted a sensitivity analysis to
test how key components such as crop yield and managing organic
affected the model.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
"We looked at high and low yields and found that they affected
the emissions per kilogram of vegetable," Cleveland explained.
"For every square meter of garden, if you get 10 times the amount
of vegetables, then the amount of emissions per vegetable goes down,
because you're dividing more vegetables into the emissions per square
meter. Ironically, that makes the contribution of the garden less on a
per-vegetable basis. This means for the garden as a whole, higher
yield reduces the emissions because fewer vegetables are
purchased."</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
Another variable also impacted outcomes: the way in which household
organic waste was handled. "There's the potential for home
composting to be either positive or negative for the climate,"
Cleveland said. "It takes a lot of attention to do it right."
He noted that if optimal moisture and air conditions are not
maintained, the waste becomes anaerobic and emits methane and nitrous
oxide, powerful greenhouse gases.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
"We found that if household organic waste was exported to
landfills that captured methane and burned it to generate electricity,
households sending their organic waste to a central facility would
reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than composting at home,"
Cleveland said.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">"This study shows that in terms
of effect on the climate, small things matter," he added.
"How much attention you pay to the garden matters. How
efficiently the vegetables are produced and consumed
matters."</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
Cleveland noted that composting often requires more time and attention
than people are willing to give. At UCSB, the Associated Students
Department of Public Worms (DPW) is helping to make the campus aware
of how to compost efficiently. They turn food scraps from campus
dining commons into compost for the Campus Edible Program. In any
given month, DPW collects up to 4,000 pounds of pre-consumer
compostable waste to feed worms in each of its 8-by-4-foot
bins.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
However, according to Cleveland, it might be better for many household
or community gardeners to lobby for good centralized programs for
organic waste management. The equipment and energy necessary to
operate such an endeavor constitute a small portion of the total
emissions. These could be offset by efficiency such as having the
trucks that come to pick up organic waste also deliver compost to
people who want it for their gardens.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">"It's important not to get hung
up on assumptions that small and local are always better,"
Cleveland said. "They may not be. You have to keep your eye on
the real goal and not get tripped up by intermediate
steps."</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">The researchers also calculated the
potential contribution of vegetable gardens to official climate change
mitigation targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions per
year. In the baseline scenario, they found that the gardens
contributed 0.5 percent of the city of Santa Barbara's 2050 target,
3.3 percent of the 2020 target for unincorporated Santa Barbara County
and 7.8 percent of the state of California's 2020 target</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">.</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">"In addition to reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, there are other potential environmental,
social, psychological and nutritional advantages to growing food
yourself, whether in a household, community or school garden,"
Cleveland said. "However, the degree to which those benefits are
realized can depend on small things. Our hope is that this research
helps motivate households, communities and policymakers to support
vegetable gardens that can contribute to mitigating climate
change."</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">###</font><br>
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>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<span
></span>++++++++++++<font face="Verdana"><br>
"</font></font><font face="Verdana" size="-1" color="#141413">This
study informs debate in the literature regarding whether these
increasingly large fires are 'ecological catastrophes.'
Landscape-scale severe burning was catastrophic from a tree overstory
perspective, but from an understory perspective, burning promoted rich
and productive native understories, despite the entire 10-year
postfire period receiving below-average precipitation."<br>
<br>
SCOTT R. ABELLA and PAULA J. FORNWALT. Ten years of vegetation
assembly after a North American mega fire.<i> Global Change
Biology</i> (2014), doi: 10.1111/gcb.12722</font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style"
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></span>--------------------</font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000">"A surprising
result is the high proportion of species responding to recent,
relatively mild climate change (global average warming of 0.6
C)."</font><br>
<font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000">Camille Parmesan.
"Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate
Change."<i> Annual Review of Ecol. Evol. & Systematics </i>
2006. 37:637-69</font><br>
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