Elsevier

Global Food Security

Volume 11, December 2016, Pages 34-43
Global Food Security

Reducing risks to food security from climate change

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2016.06.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Climate change will have far-reaching impacts on food security.

  • Climate impact studies must address food security aspects other than crop yields.

  • Given the serious threats, action-oriented research is a priority.

  • Stakeholder-driven portfolios of options should be a focus for research.

  • Combining adaptation and mitigation is a key challenge.

Abstract

Climate change will have far-reaching impacts on crop, livestock and fisheries production, and will change the prevalence of crop pests. Many of these impacts are already measurable. Climate impact studies are dominated by those on crop yields despite the limitations of climate-crop modelling, with very little attention paid to more systems components of cropping, let alone other dimensions of food security. Given the serious threats to food security, attention should shift to an action-oriented research agenda, where we see four key challenges: (a) changing the culture of research; (b) deriving stakeholder-driven portfolios of options for farmers, communities and countries; (c) ensuring that adaptation actions are relevant to those most vulnerable to climate change; (d) combining adaptation and mitigation.

Keywords

Research-implementation gap
Food system
Crop-climate models
Prioritization
Vulnerability
Mitigation

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