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Food will become scarcer, grocery prices will spike and
crops will lose their nutritional value due to the climate crisis, according to
a major report on land use from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change released Thursday.
The climate crisis will also change what kinds of crops
farmers can grow. Some climates will become too hot for what farmers are
growing now. Some climates will see more flooding, more snow, more moisture in
the air, which will also limit what can be grown.
"The window is closing rapidly to have lower emissions
and to keep warming to less than 2 degrees.That is the key message of this
report," said one of the report's authors, Pamela McElwee, an associate
professor of human ecology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences
at Rutgers University.
The report found that quantitatively food nutrition could
also decline. Wheat grown at high carbon dioxide levels, for example, will
offer 6-13% less protein, 4-7% less zinc and 5-8% less iron, according to
experiments done with these plants.
"We are studying how this would translate into the food
we eat and also in a range of different crops, we are seeing similar
results," said one of the report's authors, Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior
research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she
heads the Climate Impacts Group.
Given that extreme events like the summer's heat wave in
Europe are increasing in magnitude and intensity, food systems are already
showing some strain, she said.
Undernourishment has long been a concern of scientists who
watch the climate crisis closely.
When you don't have enough to eat it reduces your ability to
function physically. It can diminish your ability to think clearly. It puts you
at a greater risk for chronic disease and death, studies show.
While still too many people don't have enough to eat, the
world had been making progress in this area. In the 1990s, 1.01 billion people
were thought not to have enough to eat. By 2015 it was 80.5 million, or about
11% of the global population, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
The climate crisis could reverse this progress.
A study published in May that looked at the production of
the top 10 global crops -- barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice,
sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat -- found that because of the climate
crisis, the world has already seen a reduction of 35 trillion calories every
year. That equates to about 1% of food calories lost each year.
"That means you are removing food calories for about 50
million people, that's already happening," said study author Deepak Ray, a
senior scientist with the Institute on the Environment's Global Landscapes
Initiative with the University of Minnesota. "Maybe in the future we will
see even more lost, unless we prepare for it and draw down the carbon emissions."
Ray said the climate crisis effects regions differently.
Europe, Southern Africa, South Asia and Australia are feeling the most negative
impact of food production due to the climate crisis so far. In the United
States, Illinois has seen an 8% reduction of corn yield, but in states like
Iowa and in the upper Midwest, there have been some gains in production due to
climate change, Ray said.
High-income countries will likely be able to cope, but areas
like Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and India will become even more
vulnerable. The rural poor are the least able to adapt, studies find.
"It's a very tough problem and for many countries that
are already not food secure, hunger could become a much much larger
issue," Ray said.
Plant physiologist Lewis Ziska does agree. His work has
contributed to the IPCC report. His past work with the US Department of
Agriculture found that the rising CO2 levels have had a negative impact on the
nutritional value of certain crops such as rice, and the climate crisis has
reduced crop yield. It has also negatively impacted floral development, meaning
that the pollinators, bees and butterflies, that rely on that pollen are put in
jeopardy by the climate crisis.
"Bees play an essential part of agriculture, many
aspects of the food chain," Ziska said.
He considers food one of the most important issues policy
makers should look at in the wake of the climate crisis.
"Food is the greater leveler among people," Ziska
said.
Imagine if you have a bunch of people in a room that don't
like each other, he said -- if there is plenty of food in the room, they may
look at each other suspiciously, but they will likely get along. If, however,
you make them all stay in the room for an extended period of time and start to
remove the food so there is not enough to go around, that's when relationships
get strained.
"All the hatred and fear and anxiety comes out of
having not enough to eat, that's why it is so important to adapt now and so
important to look at critical issues like food security," Ziska said.
But he remains concerned about how the United States'
political will to adapt. President Donald Trump has consistently confused much
of the science around climate change, and proclaimed he would pull the United
States out of the Paris Agreement.
Ziska had been working at the USDA on climate change for
years alongside "very good people who are in the department still,"
but quit his job in protest.
"Research and adaptation plans are essential for
survival," said Ziska, who is now with Columbia University, where he will
continue his work.
Scientists, he said, need to keep pushing to advance ways
the planet can adapt and continue reducing the climate crisis negative impact
on food. He thinks "It is essentially where the corn silk meets the
soil."
CNN
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