Giving Compass' Take:

• Writing for Futurity, Josie Garthwaite explains how the effects of climate change will heat and dry the Earth, affecting crop yield and causing harmful disasters in nature. 

• How can donors help reduce the impact of climate change? What are some of the major factors contributing to the crisis and how might they be lessened? 

• Read more about the effects of climate change on agriculture and find out how you can get involved. 

Climate change has doubled the odds that a region will suffer a year that is both warm and dry compared to the average for that place during the middle of the 20th century, the researchers report. It’s also becoming more likely that dry and severely warm conditions will hit key agricultural regions in the same year, potentially making it harder for surpluses in one location to compensate for low yields in another.

“When we look in the historical data at the key crop and pasture regions, we find that before anthropogenic climate change, there were very low odds that any two regions would experience those really severe conditions simultaneously,” says climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford University and senior author of the paper, which appears in Science Advances.

“The global marketplace provides a hedge against localized extremes, but we’re already seeing an erosion of that climate buffer as extremes have increased in response to global warming,” Diffenbaugh says.

Read the full article about the effects of climate change by Josie Garthwaite at Futurity.