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The climate crisis is already eating away at the production of global agricultural systems, with productivity far lower than it would have been if humans had not warmed the planet quickly, new research shows.
Advances in technology, fertilizer use and global trade have allowed food production to keep pace with a burgeoning world population since the 1960s, even though glaring inequalities still leave millions of people. people suffering from malnutrition.
But rising temperatures around this time acted as a drag on agricultural productivity of crops and livestock, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change. Productivity has actually fallen by 21% since 1961, compared to if the world had not been subjected to man-made heating.
As the world’s population is expected to reach over 9 billion by 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that food production will need to increase by around 70%, with annual agricultural production increasing by nearly a billion tonnes and meat production increasing by almost 1 billion tonnes. over 200 million tonnes per year at this stage.
Meanwhile, global temperatures are rising at a rate that scientists say is extremely dangerous to human civilization.
“The impact is already bigger than I thought,” said Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an economist at Cornell University who led the research.
“It was a big surprise for me. My concern is that research and development in agriculture takes decades to translate into increased productivity. The predicted temperature rise is so rapid that I’m not sure if we’re going to keep pace. “
Research has measured productivity through the inputs – such as labor, fertilizers, and equipment – and the food production they produce, using a model to determine how climate change has influenced this relationship.
While agriculture has generally become much more efficient in recent decades, it is increasingly threatened by heat waves that exhaust farm workers and cause certain crops to wilt. Extreme weather events and drought can also affect a farm’s production, especially small farms in poorer countries.
In 2019, scientists who analyzed the top 10 global crops that provide the majority of our dietary calories found that climate change was reducing global production of basic commodities such as rice and wheat. Again, the less wealthy countries suffer the most from this situation.
The intensification of agriculture to increase production has in itself caused major environmental damage, through deforestation of pastures, loss of valuable arable land, pollution by pesticides and the release of large amounts of gas to greenhouse effect that contribute to global warming.
“Ultimately, we want to increase productivity in a changing climate, but a bad way to do that is to increase inputs such as land and water,” Ortiz-Bobea said. “If we were more productive, we could produce more with less of an environmental footprint.”
Weston Anderson, a food security and climate researcher at Columbia University who was not involved in the study, said the new research provides new insight into the magnitude of the impact on agriculture .
“The regions that this document highlights as experiencing the greatest drops in agricultural productivity – Central America and the Sahel – contain some of the least secure countries in the world, which is a real concern,” he said. declared.
“This means that populations who were already food insecure bear the greatest burden of climate change, and underscores the importance of doing all we can to immediately improve agricultural production in these vulnerable regions.”
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