The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released a report and, perhaps this will be no surprise to you fellow Debbie Downers out there, the news is not good. Melting ice caps and rising sea levels, stressed water supplies, heat waves and heavy rains are just some of the tell-tale signs facing humanity, and predictions for the future are much, much worse.
As it relates to the impact on food supply, IPCC calculates that food demand is rising at a pace of 14 percent per decade. But it estimates that climate change is already reducing wheat yields by 2 percent each decade — compared with where they would be in the absence of climate change — and corn yields by 1 percent. Basically, crop yields are heading in the wrong direction and a forecast of famine may yet come true. From a New York Times piece on the IPCC report,
Climate change is a food security issue. It’s not just an environmental issue.
Fortunately, there is some positive news in the story of global warming. We already have a tested and proven solution for food. We know how to grow food in ways that cuts emissions, creates more resilient landscapes, and ensures ample yields, all while reducing the use of non-renewable resources, fossil fuels, and land. And we know how to get more nutrition from what we’re already producing. It’s called organic farming!
Writing for Civil Eats, Anna Lappé, outlined the following four climate-smart food strategies:
- Reduce food waste. Globally, we’re wasting as much as 30 percent of all food that could be eaten. Food waste is often the single largest component of municipal solid waste, making it a major source of methane emissions, a greenhouse gas (GHG) with 21 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide.
- Guard the soil. Across the planet, ecosystems on the land—soils, forests, prairies—absorb about one third of the greenhouse gases humans emit each year. Industrial agriculture practices now going global destroy soil carbon, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Much of the farmland across our Midwest that had levels of 20 percent carbon as recently as the 1950s, now contain only one or two percent, according to the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute.
- Protect the oceans. Keeping oceans healthy is key to food security. In a typical season, only 30 to 50 percent of nitrogen applied is absorbed by crops; the rest is lost as leaching or runoff, ending up in rivers and oceans.
- Grow (and eat) food, real food. Take a look at all the corn planted in the United States in 2013, 87 million acres of it, and you’ll find only 1.8 percent was eaten, as cereals or food. The rest was grown for feedlots, ethanol plants, or industrial products. We’re wasting farmland—often prime farmland—to grow crops that we don’t consume, or eat directly.
Find Lappé’s complete list of recommendations and article here.
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Image by Oyvind Solstad