English references

Major study finds world's most productive farming regions are especially vulnerable to rising temperatures, and face steep declines in agricultural output this century.

Even if agricultural practices adapt in response to higher temperatures, five of the world's six main staple crops will suffer severe losses due to climate change. Global corn yields are projected to fall by about 12 or 28 per cent by the end of the century

Eat-Lancet report recommended shift to more plant-based, climate-friendly diet but was extensively attacked online [...] The report recommended that if global red meat eating was cut by 50%, the “planetary health diet” would provide nutritious food to all while tackling the harms caused by animal agriculture, which accounts for over 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. It suggested individuals – particularly in wealthy countries – should increase their consumption of nuts, pulses and other plant-based foods while cutting meat and sugar from their diets.

The world could fall short of food by 2050 due to falling crop yields, insufficient investment in agricultural research and trade shocks, according to Joe Biden’s special envoy for food security, Dr Cary Fowler. Fowler, who is also known as the “father” of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a global store of seeds for the most significant crops, said studies by agricultural economists showed the world needed to produce 50-60% more food by 2050 in order to feed its growing population. But crop yields rates were projected to decline by between 3-12% as a result of global heating.

Depleted soil leads to reduced yields, forcing farmers to rely on fertilizers that raise food production costs, consumer prices.

Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security. Concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream could trigger such events, but so far this has not been quantified. Specifically, the ability of state-of-the art crop and climate models to adequately reproduce such high impact events is a crucial component for estimating risks to global food security. Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. While climate models accurately simulate atmospheric patterns, associated surface weather anomalies and negative effects on crop responses are mostly underestimated in bias-adjusted simulations. Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain. Our results suggest that model-blind spots for such high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards have to be anticipated and acc

Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) 2024

abs_empty

the biophysical limits of food production are being reached. Second, current food production systems are actively destroying the very resource base upon which they rely. Third, the majority of food production and all its storage and distribution is critically dependent upon fossil fuels, not only making the food supply vulnerable to price and supply instability, but also presenting an impossible choice between food security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Fourth, climate change is already negatively impacting the food supply and will do so with increasing intensity as the Earth continues to warm and weather destabilises. Fifth, the trajectory of increasing food demand that cannot easily be reversed. Sixth, the prioritisation of economic efficiency and profit in world trade has undermined food sovereignty and the resilience of food production at multiple scales, making both production and distribution highly vulnerable to disruptive shocks. Considered individually, each one of the hard trends presents a

The excessive use of phosphorus is depleting reserves vital to global food production, while also adding to the climate crisis

In Europe, a large-scale war could cause the Baltic Sea to freeze over and severely compromise food security – potentially for decades and even centuries to come. An ever-growing body of work has shown that even a local nuclear conflict could usher in a climate catastrophe. As marine scientists, we have considered what this could specifically mean for the world’s oceans. In 1982, a group of scientists including Carl Sagan began to raise the alarm on a climate apocalypse that could follow nuclear war. Using simple computer simulations and historic volcanic eruptions as natural analogues, they showed how smoke that lofted into the stratosphere from urban firestorms could block out the sun for years.

There is a big shortfall between the amount of food we produce today and the amount needed to feed everyone in 2050. There will be nearly 10 billion people on Earth by 2050—about 3 billion more mouths to feed than there were in 2010. As incomes rise, people will increasingly consume more resource-intensive, animal-based foods. At the same time, we urgently need to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural production and stop conversion of remaining forests to agricultural land.

As China's record heatwave starts to subside, farmers are assessing the damage caused by a prolonged drought and the government is urging them to replant or switch crops where they can.

The National Drought Group of the UK predicts that yields of some vegetable crops—carrots, onion, and potatoes—could be cut in half. The European Drought Observatory says that almost half of the bloc is drier than it has been since the Renaissance. China’s agricultural ministry has urged farmers to undertake emergency switches to different crops following a historic heatwave.

At his remote woodland home, Ben Green is trying to stay positive about a collapse of the food supply

Well, cacao plants seem to be increasingly victims of fungal disease and climate change. Climate change may increase coastal flooding, worsen wildfires and hurricanes, foster the spread of insect-borne diseases, destroy coral reefs, threaten hundreds of animal species, and erode our current way of life, but jeopardize chocolate? .....

Climate change has been relatively kind to banana suppliers so far – but in the decades to come, friend may turn to foe. Temperatures are likely to get so hot that the annual production gains enjoyed by banana suppliers will begin to drop. And in some places, total banana yields will begin to decline.

there is growing consensus among experts that climate change will severely affect coffee crops over the next 80 years. By 2100, more than 50 per cent of the land used to grow coffee will no longer be arable.

To prevent crop damage, over the last 30 years farmers have increased the altitude at which they plant potatoes by more than 1,000 metres, said Mamani. The curator of the CIP germplasm bank, Rene Gómez, predicts that at this rate of prolonged drought and high temperatures for much of the year, followed by severe frost and plunging temperatures that freeze up the fields, potatoes are “absolutely at risk” in Peru’s highlands. “I estimate that in 40 years there will be nowhere left to plant potatoes [in Peru’s highlands],” ...

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.