KULCHA Symposium Presenter, Christopher Nesbitt: Addressing climate change in the time of Covid

Christopher Nesbitt emigrated to Belize in 1985. Since 1988 he has been working on degraded land repair on former depleted citrus and cattle land, focused on agroforestry, and food security in San Pedro Columbia . He managed the Toledo Cacao Growers Association from 1997-2004, increasing membership from 225 farmers to over 700. In 2004 he started the Maya Mountain Research Farm on his farm, designed as a living classroom of agroforestry, focused on climate change mitigation and adaption and carbon drawdown through land use. The farm has hundreds of species of plants and multiple cultivars of those plants.

About the Presentation

Thematic Session: Traditional Ecological Knowledge - September 3rd, 2021 from 10:15 AM to 11:30 AM (UTC-6:00)

Humans face a series of challenges tied to anthropogenic climate change ranging from rising temperature, rising sea levels, drought, flooding, loss of soil, increased impact and degradation of cultivated lands, food insecurity, increasing rural to urban migration, with rural and urban unemployment.



Belizes traditional land use patterns have been displaced by biologically and financially unstable monocultures. We face additional challenges of a stagnant economy with the collapse of tourism due to Covid, high levels of both urban and rural unemployment and decreased foreign revenue to purchase food and fuel from abroad. 



The challenges and their solutions for much of Belize are overlapping. Increasing rural employment, repairing degraded land, increasing soil fertility, creating models of land use that replicate ecosystem functions of primary habitat, namely soil and soil moisture retention, creation of habitat and carbon drawdown, is possible through education and outreach. 



Multistrata agroforestry systems composed of food, fiber, fodder, timber, marketable and medicinal crops offer ways to generate income and drawdown carbon.

Pyrolizing crop residues to make biochar puts non-labile carbon in soil, increases habitat for soil biota, boosts soil fertility, creates employment and builds anti-fragile models of production at the same time. 

By mimicking the process of succession seen in “wamil”, or regenerative forest in degraded landscapes using analog species, the farmer becomes a vested stakeholder in a process that actively draws down carbon and provides yields from Year 1.

These diversified practices build on the experience of traditional small holder farmers.