(C) Common Dreams
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The IPCC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too [1]
['Lisa Held', 'Wendy Johnson', 'Anne Marshall-Chalmers', 'Bridget Shirvell', 'Tove Danovich', 'Hilary Macht', 'Caroline Hatano', 'Grey Moran', 'Follow']
Date: 2023-03-20
The world’s top climate scientists are not pulling any punches in their latest assessment : The climate crisis is already affecting the world’s food supply and exacerbating hunger—and those impacts are going to get worse.
“Rapid and far-reaching transitions” are required in every sector, the experts concluded, including food and agriculture. And if we’re going to “secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” those changes must happen within the current decade.
“Food systems around the world are being pounded by the climate crisis now. Every fraction of a degree of warming raises the risk of food shortages and multiple crop failures,” said Million Belay, a food systems expert with the international nonprofit IPES-Food, in reaction to the report’s publication. “Transforming food systems is now an urgent priority and a massive opportunity.”
Since its creation in 1998, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has convened every five to seven years to review the climate science and provide governments with updates to set policies. Its last cycle, completed in 2014, led to the historic Paris Agreement.
“Transforming food systems is now an urgent priority and a massive opportunity.”
~ Million Belay, IPES-Food
Over the past few years, IPCC members have put out a series of reports that have not spurred nearly enough action, including several last year that included how the food system will need to adapt to inevitable changes while also contributing to critical emissions reductions.
The panel confirmed what many have been saying and experiencing: Climate change is making it harder for farmers to produce food, and those challenges will likely get worse due to declining crop and fishery productivity and losses from events like droughts and flooding. They emphasized that adaptation within the food system is possible only if it happens extremely quickly and that the most effective solutions identified would work with natural processes to also preserve biodiversity and resilient ecosystems.
The experts also declared food systems solutions as a critical component to hitting targets that would prevent catastrophic outcomes. The authors estimated that the sector could provide nearly one-third of the greenhouse gas reductions needed.
This latest publication doesn’t offer dramatic new conclusions about the food system, but it does set new benchmarks that are meaningful for every sector. To limit warming to 1.5°C—beyond which research shows impacts will likely be catastrophic—global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced 60 percent by 2035.
To be clear, the authors found that hitting 1.5°C is now inevitable, but that aggressive emissions cuts now could then reverse the trend, bringing global temperatures back down. And yet the promises and plans countries have made so far come nowhere near what will be needed to do that. (Food companies, by the way, are in the same boat.) To have any chance at hitting it, the experts say, deep, far-reaching changes must be made immediately.
Thankfully, there are now more opportunities than ever before, especially since the cost of solar and wind energy has dropped exponentially. While shifting energy use to those systems represents the most powerful climate solution available, some food and agriculture solutions follow close behind.
Those include reducing deforestation, especially in tropical regions, and increasing carbon sequestration by improving cropland management and implementing systems like agroforestry. On the demand side, shifting diets away from climate-intensive foods like animal proteins and reducing food waste would cut emissions on several fronts, including methane and nitrous oxide emissions and freeing up land for ecosystem and forest restoration, the authors write. (More explicit language about how plant-based foods could halve emissions of the average Western diet was removed from the report in response to pressure from the meat-producing countries Brazil and Argentina.) “Many agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) options provide adaptation and mitigation benefits that could be upscaled in the near-term across most regions.”
The report comes at a critical time for the food system.
Attention to the connection between food and climate has only increased since last year. Debate over global solutions proposed at COP27 in November was heated and will continue as the Biden Administration prepares to host the first AIM for Climate Summit in May. Projects funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) recent Climate-Smart Commodities initiative are just getting started. And some farmers and advocates are pushing policymakers to prioritize climate initiatives as they prepare to draft the 2023 Farm Bill.
When boiled down, the IPCC’s summary stresses that if policymakers fail to act immediately, it will become harder and harder to reach any goal that ensures that we have food to eat and the planet remains livable.
“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” the authors write. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”
In other words, if those actions fall short, by the time the panel convenes again, it will be too late. As IPCC chair Hoesung Lee said during a press conference today, “We are walking when we should be sprinting.”
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[1] Url:
https://civileats.com/2023/03/20/the-ipccs-latest-climate-report-is-a-final-alarm-for-food-systems-too/
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