Risk of increased food insecurity under stringent global climate change mitigation policy
Food insecurity can be directly exacerbated by climate change due to crop-production-related impacts of warmer and drier conditions that are expected in important agricultural regions. However, efforts to mitigate climate change through comprehensive, economy-wide GHG emissions reductions may also negatively affect food security, due to indirect impacts on prices and supplies of key agricultural commodities. Here we conduct a multiple model assessment on the combined effects of climate change and climate mitigation efforts on agricultural commodity prices, dietary energy availability and the population at risk of hunger.
A robust finding is that by 2050, stringent climate mitigation policy, if implemented evenly across all sectors and regions, would have a greater negative impact on global hunger and food consumption than the direct impacts of climate change.
The negative impacts would be most prevalent in vulnerable, low-income regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where food security problems are already acute.
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Authors
Specifications
- Publication title
- Risk of increased food insecurity under stringent global climate change mitigation policy
- Publication date
- 30 July 2018
- Publication type
- Article
- Publication language
- English
- Magazine
- Nature Climate Change
- Issue
- 8, pages 699–703 (2018)
- Product number
- 3364
