As COP27 gets underway November 6-18 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, the Royal Bank of Canada has released a report that recommends a united approach for sustainable agriculture in Canada.

“The world needs another green revolution,” says a report released by the Royal Bank of Canada, BCG Centre for Canada’s Future and Arrell Food Institute, “and a united strategy in Canada toward sustainable food.”

“How do we, as a country, produce more food for ourselves but also for the world? And how do we do that while cutting emissions?” said John Stackhouse, senior vice-president at RBC. “That, to me, is the Canadian moonshot of the 2020s.”

By Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s estimate: 10 per cent of Canada’s emissions are from crop and livestock production. Link here: https://bit.ly/3t8M8Yh

These issues are tackled in a special three-part series on Disruptors, an RBC podcast, called, “The Growing Challenge.” In it, co-hosts John Stackhouse and Trinh Theresa Do speak with some of the top innovators and big-picture thinkers.

One of those interviews is with Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph.

In a transcript of the podcast he says, “The scale of the production challenge is huge, and at the same time we have to not only take greenhouse gas emissions out of agriculture, we actually have to turn the arrow around and make agriculture absorb greenhouse gases. So we’re not trying to reduce emissions in agriculture. We’re trying to make agriculture a net sink for greenhouse gases.”

For the podcast and transcript notes, link here: https://bit.ly/3hmskxM

Source: Royal Bank of Canada November 1, 2022