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⛵ Welcome aboard to the revamped Climate starts with SEA! We are now back with a new brand identity but same continued desire to inspire climate action in Southeast Asia by sharing stories about how regional innovators are solving climate problems.

◀️ We published our last issue [#17], which covered aquaculture, on new year's eve prior to hitting pause in order to take a step back and plan our content for the next few months.

🚜 In the next few issues, we’ll be plowing into the related and complex topic of agriculture & food…

🍽️ How we eat has an intimate relationship with the climate and we’ll be digging into startups & other organizations who are tackling these issues, starting with agricultural decarbonization.

🌱 We hope that these next few issues will plant the seeds of curiosity regarding your relationship with food and the climate!

🤔 What’s the deal with agricultural decarbonization?

😮 Most of the time when we hear decarbonization we think about the energy sector and heavy industries, which utilize fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. We are less likely to think about agriculture because it’s perhaps less obvious, but did you know that our food systems are a major consumer of products from the petrochemical industry?

🥈 While the current largest source of GHGs in ASEAN countries come from the energy sector, land-use change / forestry and agriculture are the second & third largest sources, respectively. Combined they contribute about 36% of emissions in ASEAN (Climate Watch, 2020)!

📊 Previously, deforestation & land use—which is interrelated with agriculture—accounted for the majority of Southeast Asia’s emissions between 1990 and 2010, which is also the period when the region experienced the highest growth rate in emissions in the world (ADB, 2016).

👏🏻 However, recently, rates of deforestation have been reduced significantly, with Indonesia alone reducing it by 90% since 2015 (NICFI, 2023). Moreover, start-ups such as Handprint, FairAtmos, Bumiterra, and Carbonethics—all whom we have covered in previous issues—are tackling the above challenges through incentivizing nature-based solutions to combat the interrelated issues of land use. We will also cover another start-up combating the problem called Arkadiah in a future issue within this agriculture series, so stay tuned!

🌾 In any case, this means that if we are to mitigate climate change overall, then addressing agriculture as well as land-use change / forestry needs to a priority. Beyond this, however, there is also an adaptation component: climate change is also severely affected by the environment through shifts in growing seasons, and declining soil health. Thus, when discussing agriculture we need to consider both climate mitigation as well as adaptation. While this issue focuses primarily on mitigation through decarbonization, we will also address adaptation in later issues within this agriculture series.

⚫ Let’s also be clear on what we mean by decarbonization here. As we’ve mentioned in previous issues, carbon dioxide is sort of used as the common currency of GHGs in the climate discourse; however, let us not forget that there’s also gasses such as methane (CH₄), nitrogen oxide (NO_x), etc. that have a global warming potential (GWP) even more potent than carbon.

♨️ One of the biggest GHG sources in agriculture is actually from CH₄, a gas that we’ve covered in previous issues given that it is over 84 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide (GHGSat, 2023)! So what exactly is the source of CH₄ in the agriculture source?

🐄 Are you a fan of beef or dairy products? Well, if you are, we have some bad news for you. Cattle contributes to about 65% of GHG emissions to the livestock sector emissions, making cattle the largest contributor. Beef production itself contributes 2.9 gigatonnes (Gt)—or 41% of the total sector—whereas cow milk production contributes 1.4 Gt or 20% equivalent of the total sector (FAO, 2013). We briefly mentioned the carbon intensity of different proteins during our blue economy series and we will be diving even deeper into this topic in a future issue with Burgreens, in which we will cover in our alternative protein!

🍙 Beyond beef or dairy products, who here is a fan of rice? Well, as good Southeast Asians, we sure are! However, just like cattle, this delicious treat also comes with a climate cost and it’s primarily related to CH₄…

💯 That figure is a huge contributor in Southeast Asia, with the population of the region choosing rice as their staple food.

🍚 Rice is central in Southeast Asia’s effort to eradicate hunger and malnutrition with 50% of the region’s population’s daily caloric intake comes from rice (Seasia, 2022). However due to the effects of climate change Southeast Asia’s rice production is now even more vulnerable given increased drought stress and severe flooding, since rice cultivation is so intimately tied to the water cycles (FAO, 2012).

💡 Fortunately, there are ways in which we can manage to cultivate rice while also minimizing emissions; in fact we have an interview with an innovator who is tackling this very problem later on in the issue! Here’s some of the techniques that we can use to decarbonize rice cultivation (Rize, 2023):

• 💦 Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) entails the periodic drying and re-flooding of rice fields, contrasting with the conventional practice of maintaining a continuous flood. Its effectiveness in reducing water usage by 30% has been proven, while also increasing yield, and decreasing methane emissions by 1.4 tons per hectare per season.

• 🌱 Direct Seeded Rice (DSR) is a method where rice seeds are directly sown into the soil, in contrast to the prevalent practice of using transplanted rice kept in continuously flooded nurseries. This direct seeding approach not only reduces water usage and seed costs but can also lower methane emissions by 0.3 tons per hectare per season.

• 🦠 Soil bacteria additives consist of specialized bacteria that are added to the soil to regulate its properties. These additives diminish the need for fertilizer, enhance grain quality, and can reduce methane emissions by 3.3 tons per hectare per season.

📚 Want to learn more about this topic?

1. “Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock” from FAO

2. “Rice Production and Food Security in Southeast Asia under Threat from El Niño” from ISEAS

3. “Solutions for sustainable livestock production in Asia” from East Asia Forum

🗞️ Recent News

👍🏻 Good News

💸 ‘Significant investment opportunity’ in decarbonising Asia’s agri-food sector: report (The Business Times, 1 November 2023)

⏩ Indigo Ag Accelerates Proven Sustainability Programs for Farmers and Agribusinesses with $250 Million Fundraise (PR Newswire, 15 September 2023)

🚀 Wavemaker Impact, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, GenZero, and Temasek Launch New Agri-Tech Startup Rize (TN Global, 7 June 2023)

👎🏻 Bad News

😕 Farmers ambivalent over Vietnam’s low-carbon rice programme (Eco-Business, 17 November 2023)

📢 Other Voices

⤵️ Temasek: Asia ‘behind the curve’ on agri-food decarbonisation by Nishta Asthana (Asian Investor, 2 November 2023)

🔭 In search of greener pastures for sustainable growth in Vietnam by Joseph Negrine (East Asia Forum, June 27 2023)

🎙️ Interview with Dhruv of Rize

💡 Why were you initially inspired to work on decarbonizing agriculture?

🗓️ I have been in the food, agriculture, and sustainability space for the better part of a decade, where my experience includes establishing platforms in food/agriculture supplychain like WOTU/HyperPure which was acquired by Zomato. I actually briefly joined Gojek to lead Gofresh but left back to Bangalore after a few months to take up a more upstream start up opportunity in agriculture and sustainability.

🔨 I built Nurture Farms with UPL but it didn’t work as I had hoped as we weren’t able to bring the right investors in to help scale. Just around the same time that happened, an opportunity with Rize rose to the surface and I decided to leave Nuture Farms and pursue Rize.

🛠️ How exactly is Rize solving it?

🌾 Rize is an open platform for any innovator to build solutions for Rice farmers at scale. This could be remote sensing, IOT, MRV, seed treatment, bio solution or any useful technology that can reduce GHG emissions and improve yield.

🚀 We launched about a year ago with a scale of 5k farmers onboarded so far, with 2k across 2 seasons, and we are have now started our 3rd season. With that, we have targeted 2.5K-3K acres, currently placing at 2K ha at the moment. We try to contribute to the solution by providing farmers with financing and lower cost inputs. In addition we offer advisory on more efficient farming (lower water, energy, etc.), and giving them a positive yield impact while encouraging them to adopt AWD (alternate wetting and drying) practice along with other sustainable best practices.

🎯 We aim to reach a goal where in-country agronomists are equipped with digital tools to support MRV. We hope to also provide post-harvest processors for offering consumers choice without a price premium with direct traceability to each grower.

📈 We’re reaching new heights with fundraising; we’re nearing the end of the seed stage, and currently getting ready for Series A with a 80K-100K hectares target for scale. We also have a strong technical advisory council to provide strong oversight on experiment and practices. Additionally, we are establishing key partnerships with local universities for R&D to build best in class solutions for farmers in each local geography.

😲 What is a surprising fact about rice cultivation?

✈️ A little known fact that most people don’t know is that GHG emissions of the aviation industry is actually equivalent to that of rice cultivation, making rice cultivation itself the second highest emitter of GHG after cattle in agriculture.

💧 To break it down, one bowl of rice consumes over 200 liters of water, which when added, equals to 30% of fresh water resources used for rice cultivation.

🎬 What actions can readers take now to support your cause?

🤝 We are currently expanding our team and looking for individuals who are also passionate about what we do, and the goals we want to achieve. We’re seeking for various roles in Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and India. We are also looking for food processors to help build the market linkage for sustainably grown rice. For anyone interested, please do reach out at (insert email).

💰 We hope to grow more and make even more of an impact! We are seeking for impact funding and grants to help accelerate adoption and expansion as well.

🦸🏻 What do you do when you’re not saving the world?

🧑🏻‍🌾 I love gardening and have a keen interest in interior design and music. Besides that, I also love meeting interesting people and learning about what makes us all tick :-)

⏭️ Next week, we’ll be continuing our agriculture series with an issue on regenerative agriculture.

❓ Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If yes, please do forward to your friends who would enjoy the read as well. Also, feel free to let us know what you thought by giving us feedback at [email protected].

🌊 SEA you next week!

Karina & Massimiliano