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Climate change will hit both the richest and poorest farmers

2025-07-13 09:08:00, Ekonomi CNA

Ever since climate change was widely recognized as a problem in the 1980s, its impact on agriculture has been an active field of study.

A new study, published in the journal Nature, offers a particularly comprehensive, but also disappointing, picture.

In the first attempt to predict how farmers will adapt to the new climate, based on how they are currently operating, the authors conclude that food production in the world's most fertile areas will be among the hardest hit, although some more northern and currently less productive regions, such as Canada, China and Russia, may benefit somewhat.

And although adaptation will somewhat mitigate global losses, it will not be enough to avoid them.

The project is the result of eight years of work by the Climate Impact Lab, a group of mostly American researchers.

It has focused on six major agricultural crops, which account for two-thirds of global calorie consumption: cassava, maize, rice, sorghum, soybeans and wheat.

With the exception of rice – which is expected to benefit from increased rainfall in the regions where it is grown and which responds better to adaptation measures – the study finds that higher temperatures and increasingly frequent extreme weather will lead to reduced yields for all major crops by the end of this century.

The authors conclude that for every additional degree in average global temperature, the amount of food available for consumption will decrease by 120 calories per person per day (about 4.4% of the recommended daily requirement).

"These things are hard to calculate," says Timothy Searchinger, an expert on agriculture and economics at Princeton University, who was not involved in the study.

He appreciates the team's analysis, but emphasizes that there are still major uncertainties.

The study represents an improvement over previous efforts, which typically assumed that farmers would either not adapt at all, or adapt perfectly, implementing new technologies and strategies without difficulty, regardless of costs or access to them.

None of these scenarios is realistic.

In practice, farmers do the best they can with the resources they have, switching crop varieties or adding artificial irrigation when possible.

Projection

Researchers at the Climate Impact Lab have tried to factor this reality in. Because the constraints farmers face vary widely by location and economic level, modeling individual responses would be “nearly impossible,” says Andrew Hultgren, the study’s lead author and an economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

They built a statistical model of current adaptation, based on how yields in more than 12,000 regions in 54 countries have already changed due to rising temperatures. They then extended this model to projections for an even warmer climate.

They estimate that, in a scenario where the world reduces emissions slightly faster than the current trajectory, adaptation efforts will only slightly mitigate the yield reduction.

In a future without adaptation, yields would fall by 8.3% by 2050 and by 12.7% by 2098, compared to a hypothetical scenario where the climate does not change. With adaptation, these figures become 7.8% and 11.2%, respectively.

The authors predict that the consequences will be felt most strongly at the extremes of the income spectrum.

For the poorest 10% of regions (measured by GDP per capita), the overall reduction in food production capacity by the end of the century is projected to be around 13% in a low-emissions scenario and up to 28% in a high-emissions scenario.

Meanwhile, the richest 10% of regions are projected to face reductions of over 19% and 41%, respectively.

The decline in poorer regions can be explained by the fact that farmers there grow low-yielding crops and are unable to adapt effectively.

The authors estimate that adaptation may be even more difficult in affluent regions. Agriculture in the corn belt areas of the US, where corn plantations dominate, relies on large areas planted with only one crop.

This makes adaptation very difficult, and losses could be extremely large. (The expensive insurance policies that have helped protect these farmers from unexpected problems like droughts or heat waves could become unaffordable as global warming progresses.)

Although farmers at both ends of the income spectrum will suffer losses, it will be the poorest who will go hungry.

The best way to mitigate this problem is to make food trade as open as possible, says Solomon Hsiang, director of the Global Policy Lab at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University (and one of the study's lead authors).

“The number of hunger cases has decreased significantly compared to the past and this is often attributed to the globalization of food trade and the removal of many political barriers,” he says. “Increasing trade liberalization is one of the best adaptation strategies.”/ Monitor.al