The impacts of warming temperatures don’t happen in a vacuum. Assessing what, say, sea level rise will do to a coastal community isn’t just a matter of so many millimeters over so many years, but also what the people who live there do in response — sea walls, reinforced beaches, replanted mangrove barriers, managed retreat, and so on. Adaptation to climate change does, in many ways, work. That said, the world’s food supply is still in a lot of trouble.
Researchers from the US and China estimated the impacts of climate change on six staple crops across more than 12,000 regions of the world; in total, that covers two-thirds of all the crop calories humans produce. They found that each one degree Celsius of warming reduces the overall food production by a huge amount — an average decline of 120 calories per person per day, or 4.4 percent of recommended consumption.
Adaptation measures will take a bite out of that, just not enough of one. Adaptation measures and income growth will alleviate 23 percent of global crop loses in 2050, and up to 34 percent by the end of this century. That’s still a huge hit to the food supply.
“If the climate warms by 3 degrees” — more or less where we’re headed, at the moment — “that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast,” said co-author Solomon Hsiang of Stanford, in a statement.
The good news, such as it is, is that farmers around the world “exhibit extensive adaptation to climate already,” in particular in low-income and hot regions. The exception is in the world’s poorest places where cassava is the most important staple crop; the researchers wrote that those already struggling areas face higher potential crop losses than elsewhere. Relatively limited adaptation is happening at this point in the breadbaskets of the world where the climate is generally mild; those tend to be richer areas, though, and “wealthy regions of the world more easily absorb grain price shocks.” Even still, most of the projected losses come from those wealthier areas.
In short, we are collectively probably not doing enough to prepare for the food requirements on a warmer, more crowded planet. “These results,” the researchers wrote, “indicate a scale of innovation, cropland expansion or further adaptation that might be necessary to ensure food security in a changing climate.”
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