Climate Change Threatens the World's Food Supply, United Nations Warns - The New York T... - 0 views
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The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
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A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming
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“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”
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Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply
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“The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
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The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior
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Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.
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“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr. Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
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activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
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Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change
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As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.
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will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock
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In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas
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Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.
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“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,”
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Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline
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And the emissions of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,”
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(By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)
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cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon
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each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars
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The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade
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They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted
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But protecting the food supply and cutting greenhouse emissions can also come into conflict with each other, forcing hard choices. For instance, the widespread use of strategies such as bioenergy — like growing corn to produce ethanol — could lead to the creation of new deserts or other land degradation
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The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights
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The same is true for planting large numbers of trees (something often cited as a powerful strategy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), which can push crops and livestock onto less productive land
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“The trade-offs that would keep us below 1.5 degrees, we’re not talking about them. We’re not ready to confront them yet.”
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Preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is likely to require both the widespread planting of trees as well as “substantial” bioenergy to help reduce the use of fossil fuels
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“Above 2 degrees of global warming there could be an increase of 100 million or more of the population at risk of hunger,” Edouard Davin, a researcher at ETH Zurich and an author of the report, said by email. “We need to act quickly
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Planting as many trees as possible would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about nine gigatons each year
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“Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation,”
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an average of three people were killed per week defending their land in 2018, with more than half of them killed in Latin America.
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the longer policymakers wait, the harder it will be to prevent a global crisis. “Acting now may avert or reduce risks and losses, and generate benefits to society,” the authors wrote. Waiting to cut emissions, on the other hand, risks “irreversible loss in land ecosystem functions and services required for food, health, habitable settlements and production.”