California Takes Action: agricultural solutions to climate change

California is an example of a state where climate change action has helped fuel the state’s recovery from the Great Recession. In 2006, California passed the country’s most comprehensive climate change law, adopting ambitious greenhouse gas reduction measures. But instead of lagging behind, California surged ahead thanks in large part to our action on climate change mitigation. Since those laws went into affect, the state’s GDP growth has significantly outpaced the national average, and California now leads the country in job growth. There is no doubt that we owe a more than a small measure of this success to the state’s embrace of a new clean energy economy. California’s farmers have played an important role in our state’s climate change adaptation and mitigation successes. As US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Sonny Perdue has suggested in many of his recent remarks, farmers have always adapted to new challenges. Climate change, however, requires a level of adaptation few have experienced before. Whether it’s more frequent floods, extreme droughts, new pests and disease, wildfire, heat waves or loss of winter chill hours, climate change requires a new way of doing business. And it requires doing all we can, now, to avoid the worst impacts.Many California farmers and ranchers are responding to climate change. Our state’s farms and ranches produce more renewable energy, mainly solar, than farms in any other state. We also have new climate change and agriculture programs aimed at providing the financial and technical assistance farmers need to make the transition to a way of growing that not only reduces greenhouse gas emissions and sequesters carbon, but also builds resilience in the face of greater weather extremes.