Search for Crops That Can Survive Global Warming & Warmer Earth May Slash Farm Yields
.
Search for Crops That Can Survive
Global Warming
By David Adam
The Guardian UK
Monday 04 December 2006
An unprecedented effort to protect the world's food supplies from the ravages of climate change will be launched today by an international consortium of scientists. The move marks a growing recognition that serious changes in weather patterns are inevitable over the coming decades, and that society must begin to adapt.
Some £200m a year will be poured into the research by governments across the world to help agricultural experts develop crops that can withstand heat and drought, find more efficient farming techniques and make better use of increasingly fragile soil and scarce water supplies.
Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute, said: "The impacts of climate change on agriculture will add significantly to the development challenges of reducing poverty and ensuring sufficient food production for a growing population. The livelihoods of billions of people will be severely challenged as crop yields decline."
The Stern review of the economics of climate change said a 2-3C rise in average global temperatures would put 30-200 million more people at risk of hunger. Once temperatures rise 3C, 250-550 million extra people will be at risk, more than half in Africa and western Asia. At 4C and above, global food production is likely to be hit hard. The British scientist James Lovelock warned last week that such food shortages could trigger a growing number of conflicts this century between nations desperate to find fertile land to feed their people.
The initiative will be launched in Washington, DC, by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, an umbrella group for 15 agricultural research centres across the world. Louis Verchot, a climate change expert with the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, said the research must tackle the twin problems that photosynthesis and the ability of flowering plants to reproduce start to shut down as temperatures rise.
Warmer Earth May Slash Farm Yields
By Missy Ryan
Reuters
Monday 04 December 2006
Warming could bring more drought and shorter growing seasons.
Washington - Urgent action is needed to make sure a warming climate doesn't slash crop yields, heighten the risk of famine and deepen poverty for the world's most vulnerable, international experts said on Monday.
"Climate change is not just in the future. It's happening now," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a NASA scientist and co-chair of an international panel on climate change, told a meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Researchers held in Washington.
The group brings together experts from 15 agricultural research centers around the world funded by states, international organizations and private foundations.
By now, the threat of global warming is a familiar one: many scientists believe rising global temperatures, exacerbated by combustion of fossil fuels, will bring warmer, wetter and more violent weather. That in turn is expected to raise sea levels and threaten the life and livelihood of millions, especially in coastal areas.
But farm and food experts gathered for the group's annual meeting this week focused on how climate change will affect harvests.
They said warming could bring more drought and shorter growing seasons to places like Tanzania and Mozambique, increase flooding in coastal areas of countries including Bangladesh, and reduce crop yields in countries like Colombia.
The effect of global warming on farmers will be spotty, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
It might boost potato yields in the northern hemisphere, he said, but cut them across Africa, South and East Asia, and northern South America, where the potato is a staple crop and people are more likely to go hungry.
Experts said the first step to countering the looming threat is further research that will produce weather and crop forecasts than can inform policymakers' decisions.
Development of hardier "climate-ready" crops that can withstand warmer climates and resist water and salt is also needed, they said. Climate-sensitive management, including more efficient use of water, will also help.
Zeigler said some of that research is already happening, including development of drought-tolerant maize in southern Africa, but it needs to be accelerated.
To help that happen, agriculture experts are working to forge ties with the climate change community.
.