Extreme heatwaves, prolonged droughts and worsening floods are among features of a changing climate on a warming planet, and they will inevitably impact our food supplies. Yet just how much of an impact warming temperatures will have on agriculture and animal husbandry worldwide is hotly debated.
The result of that failure, they explain in a study, will be that “humanity will be forced into a new era in which past experience is of reduced validity and uncertainties increase dramatically.” In other words, much of the world will be in a climatic flux with unpredictable consequences.
Because the vast majority of global crop production takes place in areas with predictable patterns of rainfall, temperature and aridity, extreme and increasingly erratic weather will decimate crops and make large swaths of land no longer suitable for agriculture, the experts say.
The areas most vulnerable to climate change because of their low resilience to further climate stresses are tropical South and Southeast Asia as well as the so-called Sahel region in Africa, a semiarid area stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea between the Saharan desert and the humid Guinean zone. Read more…
