Giving Compass' Take:
- Michael Riojas reports on research concluding that the impacts of climate change are expected to disrupt major crops across the world.
- How can funders support action to protect major crops from the harms of climate change, bolstering climate resilience?
- Learn more about key issues facing climate justice and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on climate justice in your area.
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With global average temperatures expected to continue to rise in the coming decades, scientists have projected that warming will significantly harm global agriculture as it weakens crop yields and disrupts food production. Now, new research finds that climate change expected is expected to disrupt many of Earth’s major crops and harm global crop diversity.
The study, conducted by researchers at Aalto University in Finland and published in the journal Nature Food, analyzed 30 of the world’s most important crops and modeled how climate change is expected to disrupt their safe climatic space under different potential global warming scenarios.
The researchers found that crops growing at lower latitudes, or closer to the equator, will be hardest hit as those areas continue to get hotter and more arid.
Speaking about global crop diversity, Matti Kummu, the senior author who oversaw the study, said diversity will only decline as temperatures rise.
“If we go beyond two degrees of warming,” he told EcoWatch on a video call, “there are really, really drastic impacts on both the diversity and the available crops, especially in the tropics and equatorial region, where it’s already very vulnerable.”
“The loss of diversity means that the range of food crops available for cultivation could decrease significantly in certain areas,” said Sara Heikonen, the study’s lead author, in a press release. “That would reduce food security and make it more difficult to get adequate calories and protein.”
For each of the 30 crops, the researchers established their “safe climatic space,” which can be likened to a Goldilocks zone of optimal growth, using average precipitation, aridity and temperature. Then, the researchers applied four different projected warming conditions for four scenarios: at 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
As warming increases, the researchers found, the safe climatic space for crops tends to move farther and farther away from the equator, and if warming goes beyond 1.5 degrees, it could threaten “up to half” of the world’s crops at lower latitudes, according to a press release.
Read the full article about climate change and major crops by Michael Riojas at EcoWatch.