Study Reveals Climate Change is Already Affecting Global Food Production

An international research team led by the University of Minnesota with researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Copenhagen reports that climate change has already affected production of key energy sources — and some regions and countries are faring far worse than others. The world's top 10 crops — barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane, and wheat — supply a combined 83 percent of all calories produced on cropland. They used weather and reported crop data to evaluate the potential impact of observed climate change. The researchers found that:

• observed climate change causes a significant yield variation in the world's top 10 crops, ranging from a decrease of 13.4 percent for oil palm to an increase of 3.5 percent for soybean, and resulting in an average reduction of approximately one percent (-3.5 X 10e13 kcal/year) of consumable food calories from these top 10 crops;
• impacts of climate change on global food production are mostly negative in Europe, Southern Africa, and Australia, generally positive in Latin America, and mixed in Asia and Northern and Central America;
• half of all food-insecure countries are experiencing decreases in crop production — and so are some affluent industrialized countries in Western Europe;
• contrastingly, recent climate change has increased the yields of certain crops in some areas of the upper Midwest United States.

For more details, read the news article in the University of Minnesota website.