Giving Compass' Take:

· News Deeply talks with Irakli Loladze and Dr. Kristie Ebi about their recently published study in Science Advances regarding the effects of climate change on soil, agriculture, and nutrition.

· What are the effects of the rising carbon emissions on the global food system? How can donors help raise awareness for this issue and fund programs to find solutions?

· Learn more about the importance of sustaining soil ecosystems.

Our most recent Deeply Talks episode explored the emerging science on how climate change is impacting the nutritional value of food.

A major study published recently in Science Advances revealed how rice grown in higher levels of carbon dioxide has reduced amounts of key nutrients. This will have a significant impact, particularly on communities that depend on rice as a vital source of nutrition. The researchers involved in the study say it is now imperative to begin unpacking what this could mean for consumers, policymakers and the private sector.

Andrew Green, the managing editor of Malnutrition Deeply, spoke to two of the study’s authors: Irakli Loladze, associate professor at the Bryan College of Health Sciences, and Dr. Kristie Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE) at the University of Washington.

Can you walk us through the key findings in the paper?

Kristie Ebi: The experiments, that are called free air carbon dioxide enrichment experiments or FACE, will tell you what would happen in a future world where you have higher concentrations of carbon dioxide. And based on earlier work, the study found what would be expected from rice fields in Japan and in China with increased concentration of carbon dioxide. A very large reduction in protein, for iron and for zinc is expected later in the century. Iron and zinc were the only micronutrients that were tested, but there’s reasons to believe that other micronutrients would decline as well.

Read the full article about the impact of climate change on nutrition by Amruta Byatnal at News Deeply.