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crop failures
Worsening Heatwaves Put Entire Global Food System in Jeopardy, Scientists Warn
"There are growing risks of simultaneous major crop losses in different regions in the world," said one scientist. "This is not what we're seeing right now, but in the coming decades that's one of the things I'm really scared of."
Jul 21, 2023
Climate scientists warned Friday that worsening atmospheric and marine heatwaves threaten food security around the world.
Large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere have been pummeled in recent weeks by serial heatwaves exacerbated by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis. Last month was the hottest June on record, and July—which saw the hottest day and week in modern history—is expected to surpass all previous monthly records. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear that heatwaves will increase in frequency, duration, and intensity with each additional degree of temperature rise.
While extreme heat has long been recognized as a lethal health hazard that preys upon preexisting patterns of inequality and vulnerability, experts are trying to alert the public to another deadly dimension of the climate emergency: Soaring temperatures jeopardize the stability of the world's agricultural land and its oceans, putting potentially billions of people at heightened risk of hunger and conflict.
"Our food system is global," John Marsham, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Leeds in England, toldThe Guardian. "There are growing risks of simultaneous major crop losses in different regions in the world, which will really affect food availability and prices. This is not what we're seeing right now, but in the coming decades that's one of the things I'm really scared of."
"As a human being, if you're wealthy enough, you can get inside and put the air conditioning on," said Marsham. "But natural ecosystems and farmed ecosystems can't do that."
Extreme heat and droughts are already having a discernibly negative impact on food production. In 2022, the heatwaves that killed more than 61,000 people in Europe also reduced the continent's agricultural output, hastening a decadeslong trend. Also last year, a historic drought in China resulted in crop losses, while a heatwave in India undermined wheat exports. In addition, famine is looming in the Horn of Africa due in large part to an ongoing climate-intensified drought.
These catastrophes—combined with Russia's war on Ukraine, which has damaged one of the world's key breadbaskets—have contributed to a yearslong spike in global hunger.
As a result of unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution, heatwaves are projected to become increasingly common, longer-lasting, and more severe in the coming years—providing even less time for recovery between events and leading to greater cumulative harm.
"People are generally isolated from the effects of the weather on which we all depend. We go to shops to buy food—we don't grow it ourselves," Marsham continued. "But if you talk to farmers anywhere in the world, they are extremely aware of what the weather is doing, and the impacts on their farming."
Meanwhile, as carbon dioxide and methane emissions continue to propel global warming, oceans absorb an estimated 90% of the excess heat trapped in the planet's atmosphere. This is accelerating ocean warming at a ferocious pace, especially in 2023, frightening experts in the field.
Not only do higher ocean temperatures put millions of people at risk of accelerated sea-level rise and turbocharged extreme weather, but they also disrupt the marine ecosystems that supply one-fifth of the world's protein. Just two years ago, a heatwave in British Columbia killed more than 1 billion intertidal animals.
Daniela Schmidt, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Bristol in England, told The Guardian on Friday: "We often think about impacts on ecosystems on land because it's easy to see—the plants wilt and animals get too hot. But people generally don't think about marine heatwaves. That's what really worries me—that unseen, silent dying."
As the newspaper noted:
Some of the most vulnerable ecosystems are the ones used to having a stable temperature year-round, such as species in the tropical oceans. Warming of 2°C is expected to essentially wipe out tropical coral reefs. They have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem globally, and support more than 500 million people worldwide, most of whom are in poor countries.
"I've got young kids," Marsham said. "Whenever you watch Finding Nemo or read a book about coral reefs, you can't help but feel that, on some level, you're selling them a lie. Unless we act fast, those systems are going to disappear. Some people might not care about coral reefs, but there's no part of the globe that is immune to the impacts of climate change."
Schmidt added: "Not everything has to have a financial value. You need plants for every breath you take. It's the oxygen you breathe—we tend to forget that."
Friday's warnings echo recent peer-reviewed research about the specter of concurrent crop losses in the world's top food-growing zones due to climate breakdown. According to a paper published in Nature Communications earlier this month, most existing climate models tend to underestimate the mortal danger posed by "simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions."
It is far from the only study published recently to sound the alarm about the relationship between heatwaves and hunger. Research released in June assessed "a worst-case scenario in which extreme weather hits two breadbasket regions in the same year," as NBC Newsreported at the time.
Another paper from last August noted that "extreme heat not only damages agricultural yields and leads to supply drops and food insecurity in the long-term but also affects people's short-term ability to generate income from labor and purchase food."
Scientists said Thursday that newly arrived El Niño conditions are projected to make 2024 even hotter than this year.
"Without global action to address climate change, we will see unprecedented levels of hunger," the U.K. arm of the United Nations World Food Program tweeted Friday, noting The Guardian's report.
Despite mounting evidence of the climate emergency's disastrous consequences, fossil fuel giants—which raked in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits last year after knowingly suppressing warnings about the climate crisis for decades—plan to expand drilling operations in the coming years. Policymakers have shown little willingness to stop them, as COP27 ended in November with no commitment to phase out coal, oil, and gas.
Referring to the study published earlier this month in Nature Communications, journalist George Monbiot argued last week that "the struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy."
"It always has been," he added, "but the stakes are now higher than ever."
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2015 in Review: The Year Environmental and Climate Issues Left Their Silos
Journalists are starting to connect more dots: population and biodiversity, terrorism and climate, food security and ocean health
Dec 29, 2015
Call it the grand convergence: Coverage of environmental issues, especially climate change, has jumped traditional boundaries to include broader—and slightly ominous—geopolitical and health angles.
At the successful Paris climate talks in December, President Obama and other world leaders tied terrorism to human-induced bouts of erratic and severe weather. Drought and water crises, they said, exacerbated civil distress in Syria and the Middle East.
In July, Pope Francis issued a forceful encyclical, or church teaching, calling humanity to rethink economics and lifestyles better to foster care and concern for our "common home."
Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking at Old Dominion University in November, highlighted the serious "social and political consequences that stem from crop failures, water shortages, famine, and outbreaks of epidemic disease."
In some ways, reporters have responded: The encyclical was widely covered - a search of Environmental Health News' aggregated archives for "Pope Francis encyclical" shows 440 news reports, editorials, and opinion pieces published this year. Republicans and pundits latched on to Obama's climate/terrorism connection: almost 180 pieces in our archives mention both "climate" and "terrorism."
EHN.org's archives are not meant to be an exhaustive survey of reporting but rather a selective sampling of the day's news and opinion. Our search methodology has changed over the years; nevertheless, we picked up more than 30,000 environmentally themed news stories, editorials, and opinions.
Scientists, too, are connecting more dots among different environmental topics. In July and November, Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich and University of California, Berkeley Professor John Harte published two pieces on food security and the intertwined nature of ecological and social systems.
"An enormous number of conditions have to be met if humankind is to thrive sustainably," Ehrlich and Harte wrote in the International Journal of Environmental Studies this summer.
They added: "The basic dilemma facing humanity is how to solve enough of these problems, many if not most acting synergistically, to avoid a disastrous decline in general health, cognitive ability, and social order."
That thinking isn't new, of course--Harte published a paper in 1996 on synergies in environmental degradation. But the trend for years was for media and popular culture- even science- to distill issues down to one simplified meme or theme: Gun control, economics, education, health. The environment has been no different.
"I felt for a decade or more that I was just talking to the wind," Harte said. "When we talk about economics, education, health, there tends to be an absence of what I would call 'systemic thinking' ... the tendency is for each person to have one hobby horse--one pet, favored thing. They don't look at the system."
Harte suggested that even the most recent assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in late 2013 and early 2014, fell short. He said the many synergies associated with climate change didn't get much detail.
That's changing.
Obama has made climate change a signature issue of his last years in office, bringing up the issue in myriad settings. Secretary of State Kerry took a tour of the strategic Naval Station Norfolk this fall, which supports the U.S. Atlantic fleet--75 ships, 134 aircraft, and the largest concentration of U.S. Navy forces in the world. Military brass, Rolling Stone reported earlier this year, say the base might be rendered unusable in 25 to 50 years due to rising seas.
Talking later in the day at Old Dominion, Kerry connected some dots.
"The bottom line is that the impacts of climate change can exacerbate resource competition, threaten livelihoods, and increase the risk of instability and conflict, especially in places already undergoing economic, political, and social stress," Kerry said. "And because the world is so extraordinarily interconnected today - economically, technologically, militarily, in every way imaginable - instability anywhere can threaten stability everywhere."
Such arguments, Harte said, are becoming "more and more acceptable" even though scientists have known about the issue for decades.
"Bill Clinton was a very smart guy," Harte added. "But he wasn't saying stuff like that."
More broadly, environmental coverage in 2015 jumped from past years, especially on climate change.
Since 2000, media analysts at the University of Colorado, Boulder, have tracked climate coverage in news reports published by five national newspapers--The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today.
This year's coverage climbed to levels not seen since December 2009, when world leaders last tried to hammer out a climate accord in Copenhagen.
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The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us... Quitting Them Can Save Us
Comparing coal, oil, and gas addiction to the last generation's effort to kick the tobacco habit, doctors say that quitting would be the best thing humanity can do for its long-term health
Jun 23, 2015
The bad news is very bad, indeed. But first, the good news: "Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century."
That message is the silver lining in a comprehensive newly published report by The Lancet, the UK-based medical journal. The report explores the complex intersection between global human health and climate change.
"It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health."
-- Prof. Peng Gong, Tsinghua University
The wide-ranging and peer-reviewed report--titled Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health--declares that the negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the world's most impressive health gains over the last half-century. What's more, it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made worse.
"Climate change," said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London, "has the potential to reverse the health gains from economic development that have been made in recent decades - not just through the direct effects on health from a changing and more unstable climate, but through indirect means such as increased migration and reduced social stability. Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change, we can also benefit our health. Tackling climate change represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come."
Put together by the newly formed Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change--described as a major new collaboration between international climate scientists and geographers, social and environmental scientists, biodiversity experts, engineers, and energy policy experts, economists, political scientists and public policy experts, and health professionals--the report is the most up-to-date and comprehensive of its kind. Though many studies have been performed on the subject, the commission argues the "catastrophic risk to human health posed by climate change" has been grossly "underestimated" by others.
The four key findings of the report include:
1. The effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health. The impacts are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health.
2. Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.
3. Achieving a decarbonized global economy and securing the public health benefits it offers is no longer primarily a technological or economic question - it is now a political one.
4. Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human health, and health professionals have a vital role to play in accelerating progress on mitigation and adaptation policies.
"When health professionals shout 'emergency,' politicians everywhere should listen." --Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth"Climate Change is a medical emergency," said Dr. Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance. "It thus demands an emergency response."
Rising global temperatures fueling increasing extreme weather events, crop failures, water scarcity, and other crises, Montgomery says the report is an attempt to make it clear that drastic and immediate action should be taken. "Under such circumstances," he said, "no doctor would consider a series of annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the global response to climate change is proceeding."
In a companion paper published alongside the larger report, commission members Helena Wang and Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an essential part of the larger argument regarding climate change:
When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that the civilizational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.
Responding to the report's findings and warnings, Mike Childs, the head of policy for Friends of the Earth-UK, said the message from one of the world's foremost institutions on public health has given powerful new evidence that "radical action is urgently required" to avoid further climate catastrophe.
"When health professionals shout 'emergency'," Childs said, "politicians everywhere should listen."
Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report--who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS--argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands--as a matter of "medical necessity"--the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix. In addition, the authors say their data on global human health support a recommendation for an international carbon price.
"The health community has responded to many grave threats to health in the past," said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. "It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to respond to another great threat to human and environmental health."
The Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted world free from fossil fuels. "Virtually everything you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits," said Dr. Costello. "We're going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes."
The following video, produced by the Commission and released alongside the report, also explains:
As Wang and Horton conclude in their remarks, "Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Health professionals must mobilize now to address this challenge and protect the health and well-being of future generations."
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