[00:00:00] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water Resources Podcast. I am Bridget Scanlon. In this podcast, we discuss water challenges with leading experts, including topics on extreme climate events, over exploitation, and potential solutions towards more sustainable management.
Hi everybody. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Esteban Jobbagy as our guest today on the podcast. Esteban, thank you so much for joining us and, can you please describe where you work and your background a little bit?
[00:00:37] Esteban Jobbagy: Sure, sure. Thanks, first of all for letting me be here with you discussing interesting topics. I am getting into this conversation from the other side of the world, I would say I'm in San Luis, which is a small town in Argentina. I work in an institute which is part of the University of San Luis and is founded by the national research council (CONICET). Argentina. By training, I am an agronomist and I work on both sides of the fence. I would say all production and environment issues, related to agriculture and production in land ecosystems in general.
[00:01:18] Bridget Scanlon: Wonderful. So, I would like to mention that Esteban won the prestigious AGU Ambassador Award in 2018 for his work with farmers. And I guess what we would term now is co-production of knowledge with stakeholders and farmers.
And I really admire that aspect of your work, that you have boots on the ground and you are talking to the people working the land and I also appreciate the documentaries you shared with me recently on issues in Argentina. Very powerful images, for the dry Chaco issues and the Pampas. So, thank you so much.
Today we would like to talk a little bit about some of the recent hazards that Argentina has been exposed to, the Corrientes wildfires, and then talk about agricultural expansion in Argentina and impacts on water resources, what Esteban thinks could be a future for more sustainable development. So maybe first let's talk about the Corrientes wildfires.
[00:02:19] Esteban Jobbagy: Yes, I think fires are ringing a bell in South America at this during these times in many places and for different reasons. But the Corrientes fires are interesting. Those fires take place in the eastern northeast of Argentina, in relatively humid part that is still covered in great parts by grasslands and wetlands. And those fires. We have never seen fires like those. They are a new extreme that we are reaching earlier. The conversions of two important things are hitting the system. First of all, it's the local climate. We have a very strong drought. But second, many of these wetlands depend on a larger system, which is the Parana River Basin, and we had extremely low levels in the Parana River.
All this is clearly coming from La Nina influence with we have with La Nina events. We have lower than normal precipitation. I would add something else on top of this. Corrientes is showing an interesting paradox. The number one biome that produces timber products and and pulp in Argentina is the grasslands. Most of the tree plantations rapid growth, the tree plantations that we have are allocated and these fires where they reach these plantations, they get to incredible proportions, the temperature, and the man into this much higher than what you see in the.
So, the combination of these things made these fires a unique thing, something bad, but also something good in the sense that society really starts paying attention to the problem of climate change and the carbon cycle conservation production, and the important effect of fires, right?
[00:04:11] Bridget Scanlon: So, I agree with you. They ring a bell and they get people's attention and we can't waste a good disaster in trying to make good policies for the future. I understand maybe 70,000 cattle were lost, $550 million losses in agriculture. So huge losses and then also impacts on the biodiversity of the region and the national park, the Iberia National Park, 60% of that was burned. So, huge impacts.
[00:04:41] Esteban Jobbagy: Yes, there's on one side this hard and on clear impacts on the economy. For example, if you lose tree plantations that were growing for the last 10 years, all at once is a big hit. If you lose your cattle, it's really important, but also there are this more symbolic, I would say, impacts that are very important in the urban part of the society, which is the biggest one in South America in general, and a more powerful one, one that has more influence and the images of the fire damaging wildlife in the Ibera National Park and the smoke of this, of some of these fires reaching large cities. Are really driving a lot of attention on making people in the cities to, to the way in which we are managing the whole system. So, in that sense, I think this is an opportunity to do something about how we manage the land and how we work with climate change, how we adapt. And to some extent how we mitigate it.
[00:05:45] Bridget Scanlon: Right? So, there's a lot of discussion these days about, you know, the energy prices, increasing impacts on fertilizer production and food security globally. So maybe you can give us a little bit of a picture of where Argentina stands, how vulnerable they are, or how resilient they are to these issues.
[00:06:05] Esteban Jobbagy: Yeah, I would say that the farming systems of Argentina, although they may seem very similar to what you see, for example, in the main agricultural belt of the US and Canada are quite different in the sense you see the same soybean in the same maize, but the economic, political and social context is very different.
So, our systems, for example, are some of the least fertilized farming systems of the world. They also have relatively low consumption of fossil fuels because we do no till agriculture. That means that you don't use a lot of machinery. You rely much more on heavy size than on fuel. So, our system is, uniquely resilient to the crisis of, of full energy prices that we see or, or even to the fertilizer crisis that we, we are seeing and we may see increasing in the next years.
That's another interesting thing about, the interesting thing about our country in the plains of Argentina, the very no use of fertilizer, which I would say has two results. First of all, the soils are still very fertile and can still yield. Of the load of nutrients to crops without being replenished that won't last forever, of course.
And second, economic and taxation context of, of agriculture in this part of the world.
[00:07:28] Bridget Scanlon: And, can you describe a little bit about the economic and taxation, how, how that differs in Argentina from other regions? A little.
[00:07:36] Esteban Jobbagy: Yes. The, it's interesting you see that in the US and Europe is, and Western, Western Europe daily, China of course, and, and India to some extent, the agricultural belts are highly subsidized by the society money that that comes from other sectors and is going to farming some subsidies.
What you see in Argentina is exactly the opposite. The farming sector is actually highly taxed. Numbers change depending on how you calculate them, but they are 50% of the revenue of the gross revenue goes to the government, and that sector of the economy is subsidizing other sectors. So, agriculture is subsidizing industrial sectors, infrastructure, and other sectors.
What context means that the profit of grain production is smaller once you discount the tax and the strategy of farmers under this context is to reduce costs as much as they can. And that is one of the reasons I think we have this system that is still relying on mining the natural stock of nutrients in soils.
It's also targeting relatively, I wouldn't say low, but mid-level production numbers or yield of the highest possible yield because that's the way you reduce risk and you reduce costs also. And another thing that's interesting, we don't fertilize a lot and we don't irrigate almost at all our farming systems our grain production systems.
But there are very few countries that go through this context of high taxation. We are the champions of taxation to crops. Next, I would say comes Ukraine. That's interesting. That's the center of the conflict we see today in the global level and another country that has some resemblance to Argentina is as well. There's small taxation and certainly no subsidies for agriculture.
[00:09:45] Bridget Scanlon: And so, you pay about, the farmers pay about 30% tax on exported soybeans. Is that correct? Something like that?
[00:09:53] Esteban Jobbagy: Yes, it is a, and you pay, actually, the way it works, and that's how it works very well for the national state, is that you charge the exporter at the port and the exporter immediately transfers that cost to the farmer and there's no way to escape that. It's very hard to load out a ship with soybeans without paying your taxes. You can do it and some people do it, but it's difficult and the government is quite good at charging that tax. But then there are some other taxes. There are some provincial taxes, the local taxes that you pay.
So, if you ask a farmer that's good at making numbers, the farmer would say that they are losing about 50 or even 60% of their gross revenue. Or the revenues that they should have if they look at the international price of soy and maize because of these taxes.
[00:10:43] Bridget Scanlon: Well, that leads us to the topic of agricultural expansion, which has really taken off since over the past two decades, since about 2000. Maybe you can describe some of the drivers that initiated that, or that really expanded it.
[00:10:58] Esteban Jobbagy: Yeah. Perhaps to connect it with a previous topic. The subsidies, the taxes. The taxes are certainly not a driver. Actually, they are restraining expansion, so that's interesting. It suggests that without taxes, the expansion will be much, much faster.
What it is today and in the discussion of taxation or subsidies, this is an important issue. So agriculture expands really fast in Argentina and it expands over different types of land, perhaps the most emblematic one is deforestation, farming expanding over forests, but there's also expansion over grasslands, natural grasslands and over pastures.
The planted pastures or cattle raising pastures that are disappearing fast in the core of the Pampas to be placed into continuous culture systems where basically we just go from soybean to maize, back to soybean, and so on.
We have one of the fastest deforestation processing in the world here. Basically, what we see is that agriculture is moving west and that means it's moving towards dryer areas. By doing so, it displaces what we call dry forests. There are forest sections that are disappearing quite fast and creating a lot of conflicts and they are the place for wildlife. They are the source of livelihoods for many people, but they also are sitting on really fertile land. That's prime land for agriculture.
Actually, I'm telling you that we are able to farm without fertilizing. Almost at all without irrigating paying a lot of taxes and still a good cheap, this is really, really good land for agriculture and then bad news for the trees and for the people that want the trees there.
[00:12:49] Bridget Scanlon: So, you did a really, some really nice documentaries on the Grand Chaco region in the north where you see a lot of deforestation, and it's fascinating to look at the Google Earth images and you can see after 2000 large swaths converted to agriculture. So, what enabled them to expand so much and what drove them? I mean, you mentioned soybeans, you mentioned no-till and herbicides, other things that made that transition. Yeah,
[00:13:19] Esteban Jobbagy: yeah. It's a combination of many things. And some come from the global, the rising demand of grain to feed animals, basically.
At the core of the food system today is the cheapest, most efficient way of producing protein that then we use to feed pork, the pork we eat or the chicken we eat.
And also does technological drivers, the development of roundup resistant soybean in the particular case of Argentina, plays a very important role it makes doing agriculture in dryland quite simpler than before. You can control weeds very, very easily because your crop is resistant to a relatively cheap and wide spectrum herbicide, which is glyphosate. And you can keep the residue on previous crop on top of the surface that's good for water. So by controlling weeds very efficiently and how it's covered over the soil all year round, you are in a way encouraged to go farther west to dry land and keep doing soybean. That was very successful.
There's another, there's other things also, there's a financial aspect on this transition and there was a series of bank collapses in the banking system in Argentina in the early 2000 and people didn't want to put their money in the bank anymore. And there was money around the system that was finding for a good place to invest, and agriculture was one of them. So suddenly there was a lot of money flowing to small farming companies that were not owning land, but renting land, and suddenly we're accessing a lot of capital. They had a new technology that was working very well, and there were not big restrictions to transform the land from forest pasture or grassland to farmland and was a perfect storm, I would say, for the expansion of agriculture at a very, very fast rate. All of this is happening in a world that in the international trade of food products after year 2000 right?
[00:15:27] Bridget Scanlon: And, and then they also had very efficient way, mechanized way of removing the trees with chains and they developed that system. And then of course, that has negative impacts on the land that you still see today.
[00:15:41] Esteban Jobbagy: Yes. This is something, perhaps the saddest part of this process comes with the machinery as a symbol of how we do this. We develop machinery, do it really fast, efficiently. Some key thing with business of agriculture in this context of taxes and all the things we were discussing is scale, economies of scale.
So, doing it at, at a very large scale makes it a lot more profitable, but you need to clear land at a fast pace, at a large scale, cut the trees and we burn them in situ. Just keep going. And we don't. This is a triple tragedy. We are damaging the soil because we cut all the trees and burn it in situ with very high temperature fires. We are losing the forest, and we are not taking any advantage of these timber products that have a lot of value. I mean this some of these have valuable timber. So, it's a waste in many aspects, and it's just a result of the rush to clear the land and to do it before someone stops you.
[00:16:47] Bridget Scanlon: Right. So that brings us to the forest laws that became effective in 2008 and maybe at different times in the different provinces. So, it was a national forest law then that's implemented by the provinces. Maybe you can describe that a little bit and, and how that might actually be exacerbating or amplifying some of the issues with deforestation and making them do it so rapidly.
[00:17:13] Esteban Jobbagy: Yeah, it's an interesting process. We don't have a lot of public land in Argentina, you know, and we don't have a lot of land planning. So, the forest law was something new were very important in the history of Argentina. Few years after this explosion of agriculture, mainly urban societies start getting concerned and protesting about the deforestation.
And it was probably the marches in the towns that moved legislators to pass this law at the national level that asks for each province to define which forests are going to be protected, strictly protected, which forests are going to be used but without clearing. Are going to be allowed to get cleared and compared to whatever, mainly agriculture, This is a traffic light system that suggests to painting red what you are going to preserve, yellow, what you're going to be using as a forest, and green what you can do whatever you want.
And then after this law was passed, it was a big success. We went through this long process in which each province had to actually assign the map. It was proposed as a participatory process. It wasn't that participatory in some of the provinces. Argentina is a federal country. Each province has total power on what it does with the land.
To this day, in some provinces, the law has been effective and a lot of trees are there thanks to their red or yellow color. But in other provinces, what we have seen is actually a speed up of deforestation because the, the information that the law enforced at some point makes you hurry up and clear the land before that happens. If you are the owner of a nice piece of potentially good land for farming that has trees, you may want to clear, fast and get the money that you may earn from that before they ban it, right?
[00:19:17] Bridget Scanlon: I mean, there is some movement to pay for environmental service. But that doesn't really cover the cost. And, when you clear the land, the value of the land triples or more than triples. And so, the payment for environmental services is not really very effective.
[00:19:37] Esteban Jobbagy: I think, I think it's, it will always run behind the amazing profitability of farming. Always. I mean, we have in this law, the mechanism to pay for the service of having your forest as a red. It never happened, and the values are ridiculous, are very low. And imagine we are saying that we cannot keep pace with agriculture today. Imagine if the commodity prices go up or we lower down the taxes on agriculture or even if we pay subsidies, imagine that, then the profitability would go even higher. So, I don't see the payment for services as a mechanism that will work at least in the next decade, right?
[00:20:23] Bridget Scanlon: So, I mean, with all this land use change, then you see large scale impacts on the water resources. Maybe you could describe that a little bit.
[00:20:34] Esteban Jobbagy: Yeah, and that's, that's where I put most of my energy as a scientist thing: understanding the water cycle under these big changes in land cover and use.
We got a few surprises that, and I think surprises for us here, but also everyone working with water and land use. In the Plains, when we slowly replace the native grasslands with pastures or rotating crops, we didn't see a lot of changes. But with this fast expansion of agriculture, what we are seeing is that there is a larger leftover of water in the Plains.
Your crops are consuming less than what the pastures and the grassland before were consuming and to say in, in a different way, we need less rainfall to flood the Plains than before. So, we are seeing a lot of flooding and groundwater levels getting closer and closer to the surface. This trend has been going on for the last three decades, and it's creating interesting tensions.
On one hand, it was highly celebrated by farmers at the beginning because this water tables a bit closer to the surface are a source of water for the crop in the short term and can actually save you in a drought. We have seen that. We have seen that in 2017. We had a La Nina with the drought and that saved us and we produced a lot more wheat than we expected because of the contribution of these water tables to the crops.
But at the same time, same water tables that get close to the surface favor flooding and water logging, and they cut roads, they damage towns. And with time, when a dry year comes after a wet year, you start seeing salts popping up in the surface of some of the farming land. So basically, what I see is that we are entering a new hydrological state in the system, which much shallower water tables and that good aspects for farming, which isn't the main driver of this change, and some not so good aspects for the rest of the sectors in the landscape, like infrastructure, towns, and cattle raising as well, because when you get flooded, for example, dairy farms are really hit. You cannot take the milk out every day and it damages a lot more the other sectors than farming.
[00:23:12] Bridget Scanlon: Right. I think, you know, we've seen similar issues happen in the southwest US, but it was over a hundred years ago. The same in Australia, you know, with changing from native vegetation, with deep rooted and was evapotranspiring a lot of water. And then you change that to shallow rooted crops and so you get increased recharge and water tables rising. But maybe the Pampas in that region, the topography is so flat. It's one in a thousand you said you know earlier. Yes. Yeah, correct. And so, then the water doesn't move and the water tables rise and, and then you get flooding.
[00:23:50] Esteban Jobbagy: we have been learning a lot about your work in Southwestern US and the work of others in Australia, and trying to make sense of what we see here by comparing with other regions. And one key thing is what you mentioned, these Plains are so, so flat. We are in one of the flattest corners of the world. I call them hyper Plains. These are sedimentary pockets within continents that many of the the flattest ones have a very strong influence of wind shaping the surface. And that creates a landscape that's very flat and also very bad at transporting water on the surface.
It's actually, when you have this eolian landscapes, imagine sand dunes, it's like having one dam after the next, and the water moves very slowly across those landscape. And it's funny to see farmers when they get flooded, they try to get their water out. They don't work very well and they, they fight with each other because they want to get rid of this extra water anyway.
It's very hard to get the water out from such a flat place. Perhaps the good news for us when we compare to Australia, which has larger slopes than ours, is that Australia has been collecting salts in there, in their soil for millions of years. Our soils are much newer. Our stock of salt is not as huge as the Australian stock of salt. That's good for us. I mean, it will make it less painful in terms of land degradation, but we need to cope with this big bowl of sediment that is getting full of water now.
[00:25:21] Bridget Scanlon: So, I noticed one story recently about the Rio Nueva that river that formed overnight and then damaged roads and also impacted towns. So, it was getting a lot of news interest and will help maybe with some of these issues and trying to reduce deforestation and have better land use practices to minimize, to reduce flooding.
[00:25:47] Esteban Jobbagy: Yeah. Rio Nuevo is an amazing creature. It's something really bizarre that happened on the edge of the Plain close where the slopes start to get a little bit higher, close to some small mountains. We have in the center of the Plains close to where I live. It began a very small creek that opened overnight. It was a segment of a few kilometers, but the curious thing was that this was sapping, was a collapse, was erosion from the bottom up to the surface and not the other way around. This river opened overnight but in wet years it can grow.
Today it is the canyon of 80 meters wide, 25 meters deep and about 30 kilometers long. Now it's getting connected with a river that goes all the way across the Pampas, and this happened all in 20 years. It's quite shocking. Besides the bizarre aspect of it, it's interesting that when it starts breaking roads, it cut the main corridor west, east corridor of Argentina.
Two roads were cut by, this river was a big emergency for a week transport couldn't go to those roads and then it got close to a town. That's when society react. The river is also very interesting because once, once you look at the sediments in the river, you realize that there was a river there before because, about 10 meters left, you see sediment that was brought by water by the age of that sediment thousand years since. There was no signs or fluvial activity all the way to the present. So, this river is telling us that something really new is happening in the water balance of this river. So, the combination of things makes it a very unique case.
It's just one we face of something that's very widespread and common here, which is rising water table levels. There was an interesting reaction in, this happened in the province of San Luis where I live, and the first thing the government did was to paint red all the pieces of forest that at that point were painted green and were allowed to get cut. So, there was an interesting reaction. There were a few other reactions, but I think it is, it's an interesting process, not only in terms of the natural mechanisms, but also in terms of how people react to these things. Right.
[00:28:19] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah. And so, I mean, that leads us to what other things you think they can do to preserve the land and to reduce the negative impacts on, on water resources. You know, do you have ideas to make more sustainable managements, more sustainable development in terms of water quantity and, and salinity and all of these issues.
[00:28:42] Esteban Jobbagy: Yes, in the Plains, I think we need to find ways to get out of this very low cost, mid yield target agriculture that is generating a huge leftover of water where everywhere else in the world, everyone's worried about farmers using too much water, are totally the opposite.
They should use a little bit more. There are ways of doing that within the farming system. So, one level of reactions or, or responses to this would be to have farming systems that adapt to water availability in a more flexible way. For example, you had a couple of years, your water tables are very close to the surfaces.This is a good time to do double cropping and use more water. And if you can have one secondary crop that grows in a short period that has relatively deep roots, that would be great because you can lower down the water table. So, and we are exploring things that we are learning that some corn crops or as they call it, them today surface crops can do that job.
So that's interesting. If you are going through dry years, your water table goes down, then you can slow down and grow your single crop again. So, this adaptive agriculture is one of the ways. Then at a larger layering. This is the level of a plot of a plot. At the level of landscape we are learning that by preserving about 30 to 40% of the forest, you can balance the groundwater system in the plains exactly at that scale.
It's going to be a large grain or small grain patch. It depends on, basically on, on the type of sediments that you have, but that can work also as a way to regulate the hydrology of the system. The problem when you get to this level is that you know you need to work together. Many farmers need agreements and you need organization that takes a lot more effort.
I feel better about controlling water than people in this sense, and, and it's going to be difficult. And the next level would be watersheds and, and big chance of the Plain where we may work together with these land use strategies and perhaps some hydraulics. Some, some work with canals and reservoirs. But I would always start from the side of vegetation and nature in this context of this.
[00:31:07] Bridget Scanlon: I realize it's more of a social problem than, I mean, it would be difficult to get the farmers to, to do some of these things. Most of the farming is done by big agribusinesses. Is that correct? And most of these are renting the land for short periods of time. And so, it would be difficult to, maybe the government could incentivize it in some ways, but then what we saw from payment for environmental services to reduce deforestation, they don't put that much money into those programs, so it would be difficult.
[00:31:40] Esteban Jobbagy: it's interesting. We had a nice experiment in that regard. I agree with you. It's very difficult and a lot of the land is rented. Actually, way more than half of the land is not managed by, or, or under production by the owners, but by larger operations that rent the land from owners. So, your link with the land is more volatile in that sense. If you don't like this piece of land because it gets too flooded too frequently, you just go somewhere else. And that's a really bad thing for, for socio ecosystems, the lack of this volatility. But on the other hand, we have seen a very interesting policy in one of the provinces here, Formosa Province, where they are implementing what they call good practices of farming and they are giving, they are giving companies or farming companies points that they can use to reduce some of the provincial taxes and it's working. So, if that's implemented at a national level with a big chunk of taxes, there can be amazing things we get that we'll get the, if we can move part of those taxes towards incentives for good practices for the, the things that we consider the value for the sustainability conservation of the planes, I think it could work.
We need to be more creative and we need to discuss more and take advantage of this nested governance systems of nations and provinces, which some people think is bad. But I think, resilience to develop these types of things.
[00:33:18] Bridget Scanlon: I know you've also written some papers on diet and stuff, and you probably have some viewpoints. I mean, Argentina has a lot of livestock and meat eating is, pretty high. So, I would like to hear, you know, readers may be interested in how they can change their lifestyle to maybe make sustainable appointment. Your thoughts on that, I mean, varies by regions and.
[00:33:42] Esteban Jobbagy: 20 years ago, or even more 30 years ago, I was in the US and I was surprised about how many vegetarians there were there. I was sure that that would never happen. Imagine, it's actually happening. So, diet in the youngest people in Argentina are discussing a lot about what you should eat or not for your own health, for the environment, for, for the equity. Well, people in, in our society in the world, but still, we are very, very big meat eaters and actually, one interesting thing, we rely our grain to get revenue for the government and we tax that with meat.
We do the opposite. We close exports of meat so we can keep the price of meat low and no government wants the price of meat to go very high because you lose the next election. So, we have this perfect place to eat cheap excellent meat here, but this is, this is some discussion and, and the footprint of beef, the environmental footprint of beef is growing as we use more and more grain to finish animals.
It's not like in the US where a lot of the massive meat that you eat is coming from grain, but it's going in that direction. So, there's quite a lot of discussion today on about how much meat we should eat and what type of meat.
Uruguay is well ahead of Argentina, but Uruguay is already branding its meat as grass fed meat and trying to conquer markets abroad that way. I think this is going to come to Argentina at some point, but it's still under debate. And of course, surprises can faster in the future and we may be more vegetarian in the future.
But there's something to consider there. When we were making numbers about the footprint of different food items, the surprise was that the vegetarian diet, an affluent vegetarian diet, which you can eat, for example, a lot of of fruits, well, that diet has a very high-water footprint because a lot of those crops come from irrigated land. So, we need to balance things. There's not a single solution or a single footprint that we can use everywhere.
[00:35:58] Bridget Scanlon: I agree with you, Esteban. I mean, many years ago I used to tout that we should all be vegetarians. But then I began to realize that, well, should I be eating almonds from California where it takes a gallon and to grow an almond versus beef from Nebraska? Or, you know, it's more complicated and more nuanced than just simply changing diet. It depends on the source, and we need to consider that and the impacts of the crop production and the animal production in different regions. So, I was wondering if you have any views on sustainability, you know, whether we should be trying to go from a top-down approach or a bottom up, or, you know, and trying to develop, more sustainably in the future.
[00:36:41] Esteban Jobbagy: Yeah. It's a good question, right? I think climate change has been the main player pushing the agendas of sustainability in the top-down pathway. And IPCC is perhaps the best example of that. How the whole world is going to try to orchestrate. So, number one, environmental crisis that we are facing. And I'm kind of skeptical and disappointed I would say about this pathway after so many years of reading IPCC reports that are very, very, we are not react, we are not reacting fast and well. But when you look at bottom-up discussions of sustainability, I think they work much better. And they also help us escape this province that we were discussing before with the water footprints.
The water footprint of rice in Pakistan and rice producing Uruguay cannot be the same. One gallon of water in what place or the other has different values. And so, all the top-down approaches face their difficulty and the water map approaches, I see them moving really well in, in different countries. So, being in a country that's in the periphery of the world like Argentina, and how important is that when I try to compare them with what the literature says, my colleagues said about the old problems in other countries are realizing that maybe they spin the opposite way.
Some aspects, like us was saying with water, I'm more and more convinced that local discussions on sustainability are the way to go and the way to build from their upwards. I'm not saying that IPCC type of initiatives are not necessary, but I think we need to balance them more with these bottom-up approaches.
[00:38:33] Bridget Scanlon: And I think, you know, what you're pointing out also is that there's a lot of difference between water and carbon, though some things may work well for carbon and atmospheric issues, which are global, but water local issues may be very important to consider in the context.
[00:38:50] Esteban Jobbagy: Yes. I think carbon perhaps blinded us about other aspects or other dimensions of sustainability, and also made us think that this global orchestration is possible and I don't think it, it's not possible and it's not desirable. We need to think sustainability knowledge dimensions, and carbon may be an important one for some societies, but in my own corner of the world, I wouldn't start there. I would start with water very often. I would, I think water will connect us directly with what society is feeling and needing at this right time, and that is the way to go, I think, to succeed with initiatives on sustainably.
[00:39:32] Bridget Scanlon: Well, I think water security and food security are really higher on the agenda these days in addition to energy issues. And all of these things are connected and we need to understand those interconnections and try to build a more resilient future.
So, thank you so much for discussing these topics and it's fascinating to learn about Argentina and would encourage listeners to view some of your documentaries. Our guest today was Dr. Esteban Jobbagy from San Luis University in Argentina and hope to you enjoy this podcast. Thank you.
[00:40:07] Esteban Jobbagy: Thanks.
