climate change

by Lexi Van de Walle, The Lighthearted Locavore 

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's Office has planned the release of a New York City Food Pledge and Food Charter and signing campaign. The campaign will be launched on Friday, December 4th and is timed to coincide with the upcoming NYC Food and Climate Change Summit being held a week later. Over the past year, a committee of food advocates from around the City, including several Food Systems NYC Network members, has worked closely with the Borough President's Food Policy team to draft a framework for a City-wide food sustainability plan. The objective for the Pledge and Charter is to increase individual consciousness about food issues across all communities around the City and help create the public policy that is needed to ensure a stronger and more just food system in the five boroughs. The Charter addresses food access, health, economic and environmental issues, and defines the values and principles from which the City government and individual City Agencies can draft their long-term food sustainability plans. The Food Systems Network Communications Team will keep the network informed. Please be sure to read the NYC Food Charter and sign the NYC Food Pledge. And, ask your colleagues to sign on also.

by Matthew Chan, Just Food Food Justice Associate

Food is frequently ignored as a topic when it comes to climate change, despite the fact that nearly a third of our greenhouse gases come from food production, and 60% of our nitrous oxide (N2O), a gas 300 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide in trapping heat. That's why Just Food, the Manhattan Borough President, and NYU, in collaboration with dozens of food and climate justice advocates around the city, are proud to present the NYC Food and Climate Summit: Creating a Platform for Change on December 12th at the Kimmel Center, NYU.

The summit is orientated towards not only informing the public, but also creating actionable goals so the gains made during the summit move beyond discussion into tangible results that can be acted on by the participants themselves. To this end we have created nine policy workshops, ranging from ending enviromental/structural racism to strengthening our regional foodshed, which will allow participants to interact with experts on the subject and create workable and dynamic platforms for tackling each issue. In addition to this, we will also have several skills workshops teaching participants how they can make individual and community differences (e.g. composting, organizing around an issue, assessing and addressing hunger in communities) also running at the same time. We hope participants will leave the Summit feeling informed, educated, inspired and motivated to advance a NYC Food and Climate Platform for Action in 2010 and beyond.

What: NYC Food and Climate Summit: Creating a Platform for Change
When: Saturday, December 12th
Where: Kimmel Center, NYU

by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

When Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, embarked on his experiment in low impact
living, he began to reassess just about every aspect of our daily lives: how we get around; how we shop; how we stay cool and keep warm; how we entertain ourselves; and, of course, how we eat. The production and distribution of food products requires an extraordinary amount of energy and has a huge impact on our environment. So, for the purposes of the project, Colin, his wife Michelle and their little daughter Isabella had to alter their eating habits radically.

Once his family switched to eating only foods produced within a 250-mile radius of New York City, the farmer's market became a regular ritual. Such American dietary staples as pizza, take-out chinese--even peanut butter sandwiches--became off-limits, either because they contained non-local ingredients or generated trash.

Posted by Holly Emma, FSNYC Communications Committee

New York City is off to a great start on dealing with climate change through PlaNYC, but Sierra Club implores us to go further. The Sierra Club report, “Sustainable Energy Independence for New York City,” asks City officials to create a Task Force that will study potential local impacts and mitigations of energy volatility, and to require consideration of energy volatility in all City agency budgeting and planning decisions.