Modelling impacts of climate change on global food security

Terence Dawson (), Anita Perryman and Tom Osborne

Climatic Change, 2016, vol. 134, issue 3, 429-440

Abstract: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate that nearly 900 million people on the planet are suffering from chronic hunger. This state of affairs led to the making of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals in 2000, having the first goal to “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger” with a target to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. However, projections of a rapidly growing population, coupled with global climate change, is expected to have significant negative impacts on food security. To investigate this prospect, a modelling framework was developed under the QUEST-GSI programme, which we have termed FEEDME (Food Estimation and Export for Diet and Malnutrition Evaluation). The model uses country-level Food Balance Sheets (FBS) to determine mean calories on a per-capita basis, and a coefficient of variation to account for the degree of inequality in access to food across national populations. Calorific values of individual food items in the FBS of countries were modified by revision of crop yields and population changes under the SRES A1B climate change and social-economic scenarios respectively for 2050, 2085 and 2100. Under a no-climate change scenario, based upon projected changes in population and agricultural land use only, results show that 31 % (2.5 billion people by 2050) of the global population is at risk of undernourishment if no adaptation or agricultural innovation is made in the intervening years. An additional 21 % (1.7 billion people) is at risk of undernourishment by 2050 when climate change is taken into account. However, the model does not account for future trends in technology, improved crop varieties or agricultural trade interventions, although it is clear that all of these adaptation strategies will need to be embraced on a global scale if society is to ensure adequate food supplies for a projected global population of greater than 9 billion people. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-014-1277-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:134:y:2016:i:3:p:429-440

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-014-1277-y

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().