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.

This article is available on the publisher’s website via restricted access.

Authors

PBL Authors
Jonathan Doelman Elke Stehfest Willem-Jan van Zeist
Other authors
Tomoko Hasegaw et.al.

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