Climate Crisis Is Triggering Global Food Shortages - New Predictions Are Devastating

0:29This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. food yields, crucial crops already. If you just look at maize, wheat and soybeans, the loss of yields are costing$20 billion a year, that's already, and a new analysis suggests that this could rise eightfold to more than$160 billion a year by 2100, unless of course we slash emissions. We've already seen a big increase in food prices over the last few years and there's been a sort of shifting baseline hasn't there because they've gone up and gradually a lot of us get used to it well of course reluctantly yeah reluctantly but but of course people are also quietly pushed into food poverty as well and you know we've been saying in recent podcasts this is the coolest summer we're ever going to have for the rest of our lives similarly these are the cheapest food prices from now on yeah so unless we seriously change the way we produce our food we are in big trouble.

1:23And this comes on top of that report by the UK Joint Security Agency. That was warning of food shortages and ecosystem collapse in the UK within five years. That report was suppressed and it's been redacted. So there's that going on as well. From New Scientist, this is The World, The Universe and Us. I'm Dr. Rowan Hooper. And I'm Dr. Penny Sarche. We're joined today by reporter Michael LePage. Michael, you've been looking at a recent study that forecasts future crop losses? Yeah, so this is a study that's just looking at extreme heat and drought and for just three crops. So exactly the kind of thing that we've got going on in Europe at the moment.

2:02And obviously, this is going to have a big effect on sort of lots of crops and also livestock, by the way, there was a report of 3 million chickens dying in France in the June heat wave. So yeah, and this is a huge problem for farmers, because how do you how do you deal with it? But anyway, so going back to this study, they're predicting that we're already losing$20 billion a year and that this is going to rise to that$160 billion figure. And of course, the big farming nations are going to have the biggest losses in terms of the amounts of money. But they make the point that there are countries still where most people are actually involved in farming.

2:40And so even though in sort of financial terms, the losses will be smaller there, the impacts on those countries will be much greater because so many people still work and farming and depend on that income. And so in these places, we could have, you know, social unrest and increased migration and all these other problems as well. So it would be countries then like America, the US, where they maybe see the largest economic loss because they produce so much food. but you're saying it's in the countries where more people are involved in farming and maybe there's a degree of subsistence farming as well where it actually has the the highest human cost exactly so i think in the u.s it's something like less than one percent of people work in farming so if even if there's a big hit to the farming sector the rest of the economy is largely fine but in countries like niger and africa 70 percent of the population are sort of working directly in farming.

3:32So if they have a sort of, you know, fallen air income, that affects just about everyone in the country. So the researchers involved in this study say, well, you know, they point to various things we could do that we'll get on to. One thing I was thinking is, you know, how much room is there to adapt what farmers are already doing in poor countries? And especially if you think in poor African countries, like you just mentioned, you know, they're already growing crops that are that they can grow in that in that extreme environment or you know water stressed environment very hot how much leeway is there to change what they're doing and squeeze more out of the system i mean it is possible the problem is you know finding the right crops and getting them to people and sort of planting them at the right times you know changing where people have been sort of doing traditional farming over generations you know getting any kind of change is very difficult but this is not just a problem for poorer farmers.

4:31On previous stories I've spoken to researchers who say even farmers in rich countries are really failing to adapt and failing to sort of prepare for what's coming so and they've got all the advantages of the money and the sort of knowledge and the expertise to actually achieve this. So to go back to how they calculated this prediction of an eightfold increase in losses. In this study, they were just looking at three of our biggest crops. So that was maize, wheat and soy. That's right, yes. And basically, they looked at historical data. So they look from 1974 to 2004, and they correlated that with extreme heat and drought and worked out when you get extreme heat or drought or both, how much are those losses in terms of both the yields and then the subsequent losses in terms of how much less the farmers actually get from selling that.

5:22And so they then extrapolated that first to the period 2007 to 2019 to calculate that 20 billion figure a year, that's the current losses. And then they use sort of projections of future climate to estimate what's going to be coming up to 2100. And so obviously, that figure of 160 billion a year is for a high emission scenario. In the lower emission scenario, the damages were much lower. Well, it doesn't sound like that much to me. I mean, 160 billion is obviously a lot, but it could be worse. So in percentage terms, this is up to 35 % decrease in yields, which equates into what 2 billion people eat a year at the moment.

6:07I thought they said 3.5%. 3.5 % is the figure for up to 2019. Okay. So now we're talking. Yeah. Yeah. Because that was around the figure that led to the Arab Spring revolt and also the French Revolution, you know, 1788, price rise there. That led to revolution. There was an arguably good outcome to that in some ways. but what i'm saying is that we're talking about things that have major societal impact and even collapse exactly and it's worth pointing out you know this study it's just looking at the money that farmers get and it's basing that largely on current prices but obviously as you shortages kick in those prices are going to go up and then that has all sorts of there are all sorts of knock-on effects from this that the study isn't even attempting to to estimate so it's just it's quite limited yeah and so and it's just three crops isn't it so rice is a big one and that's not included and also we've talked before michael about um crops like coffee and chocolate we're already seeing really big price increases there linked to the climate yeah so these are crops that are grown in quite small areas and often in sort of distinct geographical areas so when you have extremes hitting them it has a big impact on the sort of the global yields these sort of crops such as you know wheat and maize and soy they're much more widely grown so they're more insulated on a global level at the moment but obviously as extremes ramp up and drought ramps up then you can start to get into the situation where multiple areas are having crop failures and then you have a big global problem i mean we saw that to some extent with the heat wave in russia i think it was 2009 or 2011 i forget the exact year but they pushed up wheat prices across the world because of the big shortfalls there.

8:01Yeah and like we've seen that in Europe with olives haven't we so that was just a relatively well talking about those major crops the amount of olive trees that were were knocked out by a pathogen that came in and knocked out a significant amount of olive trees and that put the price of olive oil up hugely which and it hasn't really recovered from that. Yes and that obviously that was a new pathogen coming in I don't think we We can link that to climate change. But we do know that as the world gets warmer, the impacts of pests are going to get much greater. So, for instance, if you think there are some pests that will multiply over several generations during a growing season.

8:39So if you can have, you know, five or six generations instead of two or three, if you think about what that means in terms of exponential growth and the numbers of pests you're having to deal with, you know, it's a huge difference. that those longer growing seasons are a huge difference. And then, of course, you know, there are pests moving into new areas and so on. And then the plants themselves are more stressed, so they're more vulnerable. Exactly. These are all the unknowns, aren't they, that will interact with this one effect we're looking at now of heat stress. And then there's all these other things.

9:09So that's why I felt like, you know, we could be underestimated. Absolutely. Yeah, this study is just sort of looking at what's happened historically and projecting that forward. Yeah. You know, the other researchers I spoke to, I mean, they sort of say, well, the trouble with these sort of kind of statistical studies is they may work well. So, you know, for the near future, they may work well. But then as you get sort of look further and further into the future, when the sort of conditions get so different, those statistical relationships may no longer apply. Yeah. But I think it's worth basically feeling that we're underestimating it, even given what you've just said about as you go further out.

9:50even just this narrow result, add those other modifiers in and we could be looking at something really bad. And I think the really important point here is the one that the researcher Kai Kornhuber made to me, which is the point of doing these studies is to ensure that they're wrong. Climate scientists don't want to be right. They're sort of telling us this is a possibility. This is a possibility if we carry on as we are. And so let's not carry on. Let's avoid... I had to read that twice, that bit by him. But then I totally get what he means. Yeah, this is where we could be going, but we have agency to avoid this.

10:28And that is something we always say, don't we, that we still have time to turn this around, or not turn it around, but to avoid the worst case for sure. Yes, and that's partly trying to avoid more climate change in the future. but it's also making sure farmers are aware that this is coming and they need to start adapting and thinking about maybe installing irrigation if they don't currently use it, and they can, but switching to different crops entirely that are more resistant to these kind of extremes or changing when they plant things and what they plant. Yeah, and the government suppressing that report is not helping things because farmers, we've already said, may be slow to adapt, even in rich countries.

11:06they need all the advice and help and guidance from governments that they can get not not sort of redacted reports that are somehow trying to sugarcoat what's what's coming but even in rich nations farmers are under a lot of stress a lot of them are under big financial stress so they do need support yeah they really do you often see uh comments on the internet about the uh beneficial fertilizing effect of carbon dioxide back in 2007 there was a report by the intergovernmental panel on climate change that said that by having more CO2 in the atmosphere, we would see an increase in food production overall until we hit three degrees of warming, which is massive.

11:46Yeah. And it would then begin to fall. And that just doesn't seem to relate to reality now, right? No, that was the 2007 report. And the last report in 2022 was much less optimistic. Yeah. So this team, they did actually try and estimate how the CO2 fertilization effect would influence their numbers and their overall conclusion that the result, you know, it would decrease their estimates by a small amount, but they decided not to include it because the uncertainty is just so great. So I should just explain that, you know, plants, obviously they use CO2 to make food. So when there's more CO2 in the air, there's more sort of fertilizer for plants.

12:30But it's very complicated because, you know, some plants have already adapted to low CO2 levels, so higher levels don't necessarily help them. And then if a plant's short on water or some other nutrient, then having higher CO2 levels doesn't help either. And obviously, if it's extremely hot and so on. So it's very complex and hard to work out. I mean, yes, the CO2 effect is real and it can have some benefits but it's not going to save us from falling yields. All things being equal, if carbon dioxide is the limiting factor, then great. But things aren't equal, everything is changing. I mean, you know, if you pour fertilizer on plants but don't water them, they're going to die.

13:10Yeah. Do you hear that? Sounds like breakfast is ready. Because Quaker's coming in hot with morning nutrition, 100 % whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day and that sounds absolutely delicious fuel to start whatever's next quaker official sponsor of fifa world cup 26 let's go back to some of these other complicating factors um tipping points is one that springs to mind because we've been talking about soya the amazon is under real threat of switch flipping into a savannah state because we've been deforesting it so much to grow soya so if that happens it's going to have a global impact but perhaps from this point for this conversation especially it would change the whole weather system in all of brazil all of south america so then how are they going to grow crops if you've got if you've lost that whole weather system.

14:13Yeah, so the farming industry in Brazil is actually dependent on the Amazon rainforest because that is producing a lot of the rainfall. And so there are studies showing that as you cut down more of the rainforest, the farmers get less rainfall. So when you lose the Amazon, you're also going to lose a lot of the rainfall and that farming just isn't going to be able to happen anymore, which is the irony of the situation. But I think standing back and looking at the bigger picture, what worries me is that farming is a huge cause of global warming. And it's through fertilizers and through the use of diesel and things like that.

14:49But also a big part of it is deforestation, because we're cutting down forests to expand farmland that includes the Amazon, but it's bigger than that. And that's obviously putting more CO2 into the air and making things even worse. So then if we then have yields falling because of these temperature extremes then we have people going out and cutting down more forests to compensate for that loss you know if your yields go down you need more land and then you have to cut down more forests let's make it absolutely clear that we're growing so much soya because we're feeding it all to animals so we're growing 350 million tons of soya a year most of that is in most of that is in brazil and some you know in the u.s as well 90 of that goes to cattle pigs and chickens so because we want to eat higher up the food chain we're wasting all this food so that's why we're having to deforest so much of the amazon because we there's such demand for meat so we have to start eating lower down and switching to a plant-based diet it's much more efficient if you eat the soy yourself yeah and then you can save the rainforest and you can then still grow loads of soy for us to eat that's absolutely the case but if you look at the numbers globally as people get richer they're eating more meat and demand is going up, not down.

16:04So I don't know how we square that circle and solve that. But at the moment, the problems, you know, there are all these studies that say, oh, we eat less meat and it make a huge difference. And that's absolutely right. But how do we get to that point that I don't know? Can we science our way out of this? Obviously, we could by actually just not emitting so much carbon dioxide. But other than that, we've had doomsday predictions about mass famine and the failure of farming before. and in the 20th century had a big green revolution, massive gains in crop breeding and basically industrialisation of farming.

16:39That's a very complicated legacy but it did have a lot of famine that was predicted at the time. You know you cover things like gene editing for us. Can you see Michael a way out here? It can definitely make a huge difference. So for instance you know we can breed heat resistance and flood resistance and drought resistant crops. There's a lot of effort going on to try and produce self-fertilizing crops. That's like legumes, peas and beans can make their own nitrogen inside them. If we can give other crops that ability, it'll make a huge difference. So there are all these things we can do. When I've talked to researchers about this, they say, well, the trouble is we're not putting enough money into it.

17:20We could do it. Well, Of course, I would say that, but I think it's true as well that, you know, there's not a concerted global effort to say these are the types of crops we need and have a serious research effort going into it. So whether we'll be able to keep up, I think I still think the biggest, biggest impact we could make is I know it's hard, but reducing that meat consumption. That's right there. That is the biggest by far impact that's having. Talking of money, the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, Imperial College London, I went to visit that. And what they're doing, so they're funded by Jeff Bezos, of course, 100 million pounds.

17:59Microbial foods, so using microbes to make all the nutrients and proteins and things we need and the calories we need. That's got a really low carbon footprint. It doesn't rely on land. It doesn't rely on the rainforest. You don't have to go and chop the rainforest down to grow it. and doesn't have as much of a water impact and doesn't matter when you grow it in the year as well as year round so all these huge benefits there is the the slight unbenefit of it being a microbe and not a nice steak that people might want to eat so there is that to work on but what an exciting opportunity that is yeah and the thing there is plants are actually very bad at capturing the sun's energy that's sort of like typically two percent less even but depends how you calculate whereas solar panels are getting something like 20%.

18:45So if you can put solar panels on a field, feed that electricity into a vat of microbes and turn that into feed directly, you can actually produce a huge amount more calories per area of land. And that means you're not having to cut down those rainforests. So if we can make this happen, it will be a huge advance. That's all for this episode. Thanks to our guest, Michael LePage, and thanks to you for listening. As always, do subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks and bye for now. Bye. Bye.

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