Now that the mainstream media have stopped giving equal time to science deniers, their focus on the climate emergency mostly targets the already observable, dramatic impacts: melting polar and glacial ice, surging seas and floods, droughts, and especially heat waves. Far less attention is paid to impacts that are slowly creeping up on us like all those above effects were doing until a few years ago.
Among these is food security. Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has taken note of climate-related food security issues ever since its First Assessment Report in 1990, the matter has gotten too little scrutiny. Five years ago, in chapter 5 of its Special Report on Climate Change and Land, the IPCC addressed the issue but the media barely noticed. Here’s a taste:
Observed climate change is already affecting food security through increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and greater frequency of some extreme events (high confidence). Studies that separate out climate change from other factors affecting crop yields have shown that yields of some crops (e.g., maize and wheat) in many lower-latitude regions have been affected negatively by observed climate changes, while in many higher-latitude regions, yields of some crops (e.g., maize, wheat, and sugar beets) have been affected positively over recent decades. Warming compounded by drying has caused large negative effects on yields in parts of the Mediterranean. Based on indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), climate change is affecting food security in drylands, particularly those in Africa, and high mountain regions of Asia and South America. {5.2.2} [...]
Many practices can be optimised and scaled up to advance adaptation throughout the food system (high confidence). Supply-side options include increased soil organic matter and erosion control, improved cropland, livestock, grazing land management, and genetic improvements for tolerance to heat and drought. Diversification in the food system (e.g., implementation of integrated production systems, broad-based genetic resources, and heterogeneous diets) is a key strategy to reduce risks (medium confidence). Demand-side adaptation, such as adoption of healthy and sustainable diets, in conjunction with reduction in food loss and waste, can contribute to adaptation through reduction in additional land area needed for food production and associated food system vulnerabilities. ILK can contribute to enhancing food system resilience (high confidence). {5.3, 5.6.3 Cross-Chapter Box 6 in Chapter 5}
As with other impacts of climate change, serious harm on the food front was considered to be far in the future in human terms. As it turns out, not so much. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have found in a study published this week in Nature Climate Change that global warming could reduce world wheat production 13% by 2050. That would be a stunning result. Wheat is the staple crop for an estimated 35% of the world population, the second largest grain crop. About two-thirds of it is consumed by humans, and a fifth by livestock. In a world where it’s estimated 820 million people are already malnourished, the toll could be immense. The TUM study isn’t the first to posit big losses for wheat. For instance, a study 15 years ago saw a loss of wheat in South Asia of 44 percent (Gerald Nelson, et al., 2009).
The TUM researchers looked at the impacts from a single disease that is already a problem—wheat blast, caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae. Found first in Brazil in 1985, it has since spread to neighboring South American countries, Bangladesh and Zambia. Future spread will mostly affect South America, Asia, and southern Africa, the researchers say. As much as 75 percent of the area under wheat cultivation in Africa and South America could be affected. East Asia and Europe won’t be at so great a risk except for Italy, southern France, Spain, and the warm and humid regions of southeast China. Where climate change creates drier long-term conditions, the risk of wheat blast may lessen, but the higher heat that dries out the land simultaneously will reduce yield.
The world is too dependent on wheat.
As the Russia invasion of Ukraine showed, so much dependence on a single crop can be problematic whether the cause is war or a heat wave or some ancient pathogen freed by melting permafrost.
Making the needed innovations to address the situation will not come easily, politically or otherwise. Dependence on wheat, maize (corn), and rice is thoroughly embedded economically, culturally, and, of course, ecologically. Fixing that to address climate impacts will take time. For instance, Jessica Fanzo has opined:
Subsidies for the big crops also neglect the need to promote healthy diets. Take wheat, for example. Whole unrefined wheat is a major source of starch and energy, as well as protein, vitamins (notably B vitamins), dietary fiber and phytochemicals. But demand for wheat has been rising globally because of its unique gluten properties, which make it also an ideal component of bread, noodles, pasta, cookies, crackers and many other baked foods and snacks. These highly processed foods, which now constitute a significant share of the world’s diet, are depleted of healthy nutrients and contribute to poor health.
Those amber waves of grain have other impacts as well. Monocropping along with prodigious use of herbicides and pesticides degrade the soil and wipe out helpful as well as harmful insects along with the creatures that feed on them.
Moving to regenerative agriculture will literally be a hard row to hoe, but even if it weren’t a better approach to feeding ourselves, we don’t have any more choice about transforming it than we do about dealing with the climate crisis that is making that transformation so essential.