Blog Post

Climate Change Poses Additional Challenges for Food Security

With the global population predicted to reach 9 billion by 2050, and incomes in developing countries to continue rising as well, increased global demand for food in the coming decades will place unprecedented pressure on sustainable food production. Climate change poses a further challenge, as changes in temperature and precipitation threaten agricultural productivity and the world’s capacity to feed a growing population.

Using various modeling techniques, IFPRI researchers have projected 15 different plausible food security scenarios through 2050, each involving a combination of potential population and income growth and climate change. The study highlights the fact that neither food security nor climate change can be viewed in isolation and presents four main policy recommendations for improving food security and dealing with climate change.

  1. Raise poor people’s incomes to achieve sustainable food security and resilience to climate change
    Broad-based income growth is essential to improving human well-being and delivering sustainable food security. Households with more resources at their disposal are better able to cope with uncertainties that arise, whether natural or man-made. Farming households with higher incomes are able to experiment with new technologies and management systems that may be costly up front but that will have big productivity and resilience payoffs in the future.

  2. Invest in agricultural productivity improvements to enhance sustainable food security
    Investing in improvements to agricultural productivity will enable farmers to meet more of the rising demand from existing agricultural land resources and to reduce the environmental threats from increased production. Previous IFPRI research suggests that public spending of at least US$7 billion annually on three categories of productivity-enhancing investments — biological research, expansion of rural roads, and irritation expansion and efficiency improvements — is needed to compensate for the productivity losses associated with climate change through 2050.

  3. Strengthen international trade agreements to compensate for different climate change effects in different locations
    Trade flows can partially offset the effects of climate change on local productivity, allowing regions of the world with fewer negative climate change effects to supply those with more negative effects. The study’s findings reinforce arguments about the need to complete the Doha Round of world trade negotiations and to put in place the legal instruments needed to help countries respond to short-term disruptions in domestic production by relying on international transactions.

  4. Cut greenhouse gas emissions and facilitate adaptation to minimize the harmful effects of climate change
    Climate change exacerbates the challenge of improving food security under any income/population scenario. The magnitude and consistency of the human costs of unfettered climate change across all scenarios make clear the need for immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and find ways to facilitate adaptation to climate change.

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Watch Senior IFPRI Research Fellow Gerald Nelson discuss this research.