Global warming: how the climate affects food supply
How do temperature increases affect food supply? According to 70 studies carried out over recent years, changes in global climate will most likely lead to a food supply crisis involving the entire planet: an emergency which will affect all populations indiscriminately.
Nasa has announced that July 2017 was the hottest July recorded since 1880 (when temperature recording using scientific methods began), while research published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences illustrates how climate change will affect the cultivation of staple crops such as wheat, corn and rice.
The main purpose of that study (carried out in order to provide an overview of the 70 studies mentioned above) was to analyse the relationship between agriculture and global warming. This increasingly complex relationship has been a source of concern to experts around the world for some time.
The research has examined a wide variety of issues, ranging from crop yield statistics to the simulation of the system which allows these crops to react to changes in temperature at global and local level levels. Among other things, these experiments have been conducted using instruments able to re-create temperature increases artificially.
It has emerged from all this research that there is a very close connection between temperature and food supply, so that the greater the increase in temperature, the greater the decrease in cereal production. In fact, it has been established that for every increase of one degree Celsius in the average global temperature, there is a corresponding fall in wheat production of 6%.
In addition, the same increase in temperature was found to cause a 7.4% fall in the production of corn, while the production of rice falls by 3.2%. As far as legumes such as soya are concerned however, the decrease is much smaller at 3.1%, making that product one of the least susceptible to climate change.
Considering that wheat, corn, rice and soya together provide for two thirds of the world population’s nutritional requirements, researchers are doing everything in their power to combat temperature increases while trying to promote the introduction of preventative measures so that the global population’s nutritional needs will be fully met.
Translated by Joanne Beckwith
