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Title: Climate change has likely already affected global food production

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: Crop yields are projected to decrease under future climate conditions, and recent research suggests that yields have already been impacted. However, current impacts on a diversity of crops subnationally and implications for food security remains unclear. Here, we con- structed linear regression relationships using weather and reported crop data to assess the potential impact of observed climate change on the yields of the top ten global crops–barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat at ~20,000 political units. We find that the impact of global climate change on yields of different crops from climate trends ranged from -13.4% (oil palm) to 3.5% (soybean). Our results show that impacts are mostly negative in Europe, Southern Africa and Australia but gener- ally positive in Latin America. Impacts in Asia and Northern and Central America are mixed. This has likely led to ~1% average reduction (-3.5 X 1013 kcal/year) in consumable food cal- ories in these ten crops. In nearly half of food insecure countries, estimated caloric availabil- ity decreased. Our results suggest that climate change has already affected global food production.

Url: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?type=printable&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0217148

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Authors: Ray, Deepak K.; West, Paul C.; Clark, Michael

Publisher: Institute on the Environment (IonE), University of Minnesota

Data Collections: IPUMS Terra

Topics: Natural Resource Management, Other

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