Climate Change Threatens World Food Production

How climate change affects you depends on more than just how it affects your local weather. It also depends on how much the weather matters to your livelihood, and how well you can cope with the changes.
Philip Thornton, with the International Livestock Research Institute, is one of the authors of the new report, a joint effort by a group of international agricultural research centers. Thornton and his colleagues wanted to find what they called “hotspots” of future food insecurity: places with the greatest exposure to climate change, highest sensitivity to its impacts, and the least ability to cope with them.
Other studies have looked at the effect of climate change on growing conditions in certain regions. But Thornton says figuring out how that interacts with other factors affecting food security is a challenge.
"It's very difficult to look directly at things like sensitivity of the food systems to climate change impacts, or even the coping capacity of populations to address the impacts. And so we used proxies."
They used a region's cropland area as a proxy for sensitivity to climate change because changes in the weather would have bigger impacts on areas with more farmland. To examine coping capacity, they looked at national data on the prevalence of children stunted by malnutrition.
They combined this data with climate change models that predict the impacts on temperature and rainfall by 2050 to come up with maps of the most vulnerable areas of the tropics.