This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate desk Cooperation.
Worldwide, Humanity produces more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in only a handful of pan shelves.
More than One third of the world’s wheat and barley exports Come out of Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive farmers, including major harvesting regions in the United States, are on the way to see the sharpest drops in crops due to climate change.
These are bad news not only for farmers, but also for everyone who eats – especially because it becomes more difficult and more expensive to feed a fuller, more hungry world, according to a new study published in the newspaper Nature.
Under a moderate scenario of greenhouse gas emissions, six key grace crops will see an 11.2 percent decline by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even when farmers are trying to adapt. And the biggest drops do not occur in the poorer, more marginal farmers, but in places that are already major food producers. These are regions like the US Midwest, which were blessed with good soil and ideal weather for breeding clusters such as corn and soy.
But when that weather is less than ideal, it can drastically reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme weather has already begun to eat in crops this year: flooding has Destroyed rice in Tajikistan,, Cucumbers in Spainand Bananas in Australia. Severe storms in the United States this time caused millions of dollars in damage to crops. In past years, severe heat has caused huge declines Shrubs, olives and grapes. And as the climate changes, increasing average temperatures and changing heavy rainfall patterns are expected to reduce yields, while weather events such as dry fruits and floods reaching larger extremes could wipe out harvests more often.
“There is no mystery that climate change will affect our food production,” said Andrew Hultgren, a researcher on agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “This is the most exposed sector in the economy.”
Farmers do what they can – test different crop varieties that can better resist changes in the climate, changing the Timing from when they sowsetting their use of fertilizers and waterand investing in infrastructure as water reservoirs.
The question is whether these adaptations can continue to keep rhythm with warming. To calculate this, Hultgren and his team looked at harvesting and weather data from 54 countries around the world, dating from the 1940s. They specifically regarded how farmers adapted to changes in the climate, which had already happened, focusing on corn, wheat, rice, cake, sorghum and soy. Combined, these crops provide two -thirds of the calories of humanity.
In the natural paper, Hultgren and his team reported that generally adaptation can slow down some cart losses due to climate change, but not all.
And the decline of our food production could be devastating: for every degree Celsius of warming, global food production is likely to decline by 120 calories per person daily. This even considers how climate change can make growth seasons more and how more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can encourage growth of plants. In the moderate scenario of greenhouse emissions 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming before 2100-Revi income and adaptations would only make up for one third of crop losses around the world.
