World Bank says climate change threat to farming

According to the World Bank climate change will play havoc with farming, and policy makers and researchers are not fully aware of the significance on food supply.

Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s vice-president for climate change, told a meeting of agriculture ministers in the German capital, Berlin, the Earth would warm by two degrees Celsius “in your lifetime”.

That would make farming untenable in some areas, she said.

Bloomberg newsagency reports extreme weather from China’s coldest winter in at least half a century in 2010 to a July hailstorm in Reutlingen, Germany, had already started to affect food prices, she said.

In the past three years, orange juice, corn, wheat, soybean meal and sugar were five of the top eight most volatile commodities, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“Significant damage and destruction is already happening,” Ms Kyte said.

“It isn’t a benign and slightly warmer world. It will be a volatile warming of the planet, with unpredictable impact.”

Adapting agriculture to withstand a world with a changed climate and depleting resources isn’t happening fast enough, according to Achim Steiner, the director general of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

The world risks “cataclysmic changes” caused by extreme heat waves, rising sea levels and depleted food stocks, as average temperatures are headed for a four degree Celsius jump by 2100, the World Bank reported in November 2012.

“It’s all going to take political leadership,” said Gordon Conway, professor of international development at Imperial Colleage London.

“We need more ministers of agriculture with self confidence who will stand up and say what they need, who will speak to their president or prime minster.”

Long-term climate change may have “potentially catastrophic” effects on food production in the period from 2050 to 2100, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has said.

Crop failures such as in Russia in 2010 are likely to become more common as climate change causes more extreme weather with heat and drought stress, according to a study that year led by the United Kingdom’s University of Leeds.

“If we look globally at climate science, we see the warming of temperatures and the resulting impact, for example extreme heat zones in sub-Saharan Africa,” Ms Kyte said.

“The agricultural community has still some way to go in realising the full significance.”

World hunger is expected to worsen as climate change hurts crop production and disrupts incomes, charity Oxfam wrote in September.

The number of people at risk of hunger may climb by 10 per cent to 20 per cent by 2050, with daily per-capita calories available falling across the world, Oxfam said.

While in some areas climate change may mean moving coffee trees “a few hundred metres up the mountain, in some places we’re talking about a wholesale change of what can be grown where, and I don’t think we’ve really started to compute that,” Ms Kyte said.

Climate change will likely cause a geographical shift and a reduction in suitable growing ranges for many crops, according to the UK’s Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

A simulation of spring wheat under climate-change scenarios for northeast China indicated that in the worst case, more than 35 per cent of harvests may fail through 2099 compared with a baseline rate of about 13 per cent, the Leeds study found.

Based on current climate-change models, wheat output in northern India and Pakistan will fall between 17 per cent and 38 per cent by 2020 because of heat stress to the crop, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre estimates.

The centre is working to develop heat-tolerant wheat for South Asia.

The majority of agricultural research is focused on wheat, corn and rice, all crops, which have “profound problems” in a world that’s three or four degrees Celsius warmer, according to Ms Kyte.

“We need to increase the amount of research that goes into food crops that the poor actually eat,” Ms Kyte said.