In the coming decades, unchecked climate change will stress crops and livestock alike — especially in the world’s poorest regions — and that is expected to cause serious food shortages for half the world’s population, according to US researchers writing in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
But while the world’s poor will suffer the most, Europe and North America will also suffer from extended droughts and dramatically declining crop yields, according to the report penned by David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor, and Rosamond Naylor, director of Food Security and the Environment at California’s Stanford University.
The two academics combined direct observations with data from 23 global climate models, and found that that there is greater than 90 percent certainty that by 2100, growing-season low temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be much higher than the highest current temperatures.
“We are taking the worst of what we’ve seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation,” Naylor says. “I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there’s not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food supplies.”
Contrary to what some climate change inactivists believe, higher temperatures often adversely affect crop yields. For every degree rise in global temperatures, for example, rice yields will decrease by 15 percent. “The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge,” Naylor says, “and that doesn’t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures.” (Source: Reuters)
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As always, Dr. Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a detailed look at the issue.