Climate change impact on food ‘like everyone giving up breakfast’

The impact of climate change on food production will be equivalent to everyone on the planet giving up breakfast, a study has warned.

Every additional degree Celsius of global warming will drag down the world’s ability to produce food by 120 calories per person per day, or 4.4 per cent of current daily consumption, the American research found.

Global warming will dramatically alter which parts of the world will be able to grow crops in the coming decades, reducing the total amount of food that can be produced.

“When global production falls, consumers are hurt because prices go up and it gets harder to access food and feed our families,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

“If the climate warms by three degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.”

US ‘bread baskets’ could experience 40pc drop

The researchers modelled the future farming impact in 54 different countries for six crops – corn, soybean, barley, wheat, rice and cassava.

They factored in changes farmers are likely to make to adapt to the altering climate, in order to make their most accurate projections yet.

Arable heartlands are predicted to be hit hardest, the study found. Production of corn in the US, for example, could drop by as much as 40 per cent by the end of this century.

The UK and northern Europe could see a 10 per cent rise in corn production, but the global outcome is a net negative.

“Places in the Midwest US that are really well suited for present day corn and soybean production just get hammered under a high warming future,” said Andrew Hultgren, a study author and an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“You do start to wonder if the Corn Belt is going to be the Corn Belt in the future.”

But while the US and other “bread basket” regions are major losers in the future, according to the study, other regions will become better-suited, including Russia and China.

‘We will be making Russia and China richer’

“This is basically like sending our agricultural profits overseas. We will be sending benefits to producers in Canada, Russia, China,” said Prof Hsiang.

“Those are the winners, and we in the US are the losers. The longer we wait to reduce emissions, the more money we lose.”

The study looked at a range of different global warming scenarios up to and including 2100 to determine the range of possible outcomes.

“Any level of warming, even when accounting for adaptation, results in global output losses from agriculture,” said Dr Hultgren.

The modelling points to a 50-50 likelihood that global rice yields will increase on a hotter planet in the future because rice cultivation benefits from warmer nights.

However, it is up to 90 per cent likely that yields will decline by 2100, the scientists found,

The study authors wrote: “We find that global impacts are dominated by losses to modern-day bread baskets with favourable climates and limited present adaptation, although losses in low-income regions are also substantial.”

The paper is published in Nature.