Millions face climate change hunger crisis

Climate change is likely to cause a hunger crisis far worse than most estimates predict, experts said today.

About 500 million people in the world are now at risk of food deprivation, mostly in Africa.

But scientists at Britain's Meteorological Office predict 50 million more will be facing hunger by 2050 even if greenhouse gas emission targets are met.

Other research from the University of Illinois in the United States suggests an even worse scenario.

New studies show that having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may not bolster crop yields as much as has been expected.

Consequently it may do little to counteract the damaging effects of global warming on agriculture around the world.

The Kyoto Protocol calls on industrialised nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5% of their 1990 level between 2008 and 2012.

A team led by Professor Martin Parry, from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, calculated that this alone would not stop the worsening hunger crisis.

Even if the Kyoto targets were met, the number of people at risk of hunger was likely to rise by 10%.

To avoid future hunger by tackling climate change alone, it would be necessary for emissions to fall 20% lower than the Kyoto level. When the counteractive effect of carbon dioxide was removed from the equation, crop loss across Africa increased from 2.5 – 5% to as much as 10%.

This would greatly boost the estimate of 50 million extra people facing hunger.

“It could mean there will be double the number that we predict,” said Prof Parry on the first day of the BA Festival of Science at Trinity College, Dublin.

He pointed out that climate had a built-in inertia that maintained its effects.

“Even if we chop emissions at the knees now we have 50 years of warming and drying to go,” he said.

Professor Steve Long, from the University of Illinois, conducted Free Air Concentration Enrichment (Face) experiments on a range of crops including rice, wheat, maize and soya.

Exposing the crops to elevated carbon dioxide in the open air resulted in only half the predicted yield increases.

In the case of maize – which has now overtake rice as the most grown food crop in the world – there was no increase at all.

Other tests showed that increases in ozone levels which are also expected with global warming may be more damaging than had been forecast.

Soya yields were likely to be reduced by 20% by 2050.

“Findings from the new generation of Face experiments suggest that current projections of global food production may be very over-optimistic,” said Prof Long.

Duncan McLaren, from the environmental group Friends of the Earth, said global warming meant that the unfair distribution of resources in the world had to be addressed.

“If the scientific challenge is massive, the economic and political challenge is even greater,” he said.

“Famine is not caused by a shortage of food; it’s caused by a shortage of justice. In a world where there are even greater constraints to the availability of environmental resources, including food, that shortage of justice is going to become even more critical.”