Climate change has likely already affected global food production

Abstract

Crop yields are projected to decrease under future climate conditions, and recent research suggests that yields have already been impacted. However, current impacts on a diversity of crops subnationally and implications for food security remains unclear. Here, we constructed linear regression relationships using weather and reported crop data to assess the potential impact of observed climate change on the yields of the top ten global crops–barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat at ~20,000 political units. We find that the impact of global climate change on yields of different crops from climate trends ranged from -13.4% (oil palm) to 3.5% (soybean). Our results show that impacts are mostly negative in Europe, Southern Africa and Australia but generally positive in Latin America. Impacts in Asia and Northern and Central America are mixed. This has likely led to ~1% average reduction (-3.5 X 10 13 kcal/year) in consumable food calories in these ten crops. In nearly half of food insecure countries, estimated caloric availability decreased. Our results suggest that climate change has already affected global food production.

Effects of Low Water Availability on Root Placement and Shoot Development in Landraces and Modern Barley Cultivars

“…Drought is one of the major causes for yield losses of barley worldwide [1]. The influence of recent changes in precipitation and temperature on barley production worldwide has been estimated as a decrease of 10.20 MT year −1 [2]. Particularly, barley growth in the Mediterranean often occurs under drought and high temperatures, and large inter-annual changes in environmental conditions [3][4][5].…”

The effect of problem-based learning and naturalist intelligence on students' understanding of environmental conservation

“…Various environmental problems have arisen, such as declining levels of green structures (Roy, Shemdoe, Hulme, Mwageni, & Gough, 2018;Lee et al, 2019), environmental pollution (Dudani, Lakhmapurkar, Gavali, & Patel, 2017;S. Ray & Ray, 2011), decreased food supply (D. K. Ray et al, 2019), and decreasing the land carrying capacity (Roshayanti, Ghofar, Wicaksono, & Budi, 2019;Ichsan, Sigit, Miarsyah, Azrai, & Heryanti, 2019). Then, the current global environmental crisis is also causing damage to forests, soil, the ozone layer (Andrady et al, 2017), until climate change.…”

Climate adaptation by crop migration

“…limate change is predicted to impact crop yields and shift areas of global cropland suitability [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] , with potentially important impacts on land use change, biodiversity, socioeconomic circumstances, and agricultural productivity. Future increases in temperature may open up new agriculturally suitable areas 1 , and crops in some locations will benefit from increases in temperature 9 .…”