Food & water securityEven if the Paris Agreement is implemented, food and water supplies remain at risk
If all pledges made in last December’s Paris climate agreement (COP21) to curb greenhouse gases are carried out to the end of the century, then risks still remain for staple crops in major “breadbasket” regions and water supplies upon which most of the world’s population depend. Recognizing that national commitments made in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fall far short of COP21’s overarching climate target — to limit the rise, since preindustrial times, in the Earth’s mean surface temperature to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 — a new report advances a set of emissions scenarios that are consistent with achieving that goal.
If all pledges made in last December’s Paris climate agreement (COP21) to curb greenhouse gases are carried out to the end of the century, then risks still remain for staple crops in major “breadbasket” regions and water supplies upon which most of the world’s population depend. That’s the conclusion of researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change in the program’s signature publication, the 2016 Food, Water, Energy and Climate Outlook, now expanded to address global agricultural and water resource challenges.
Recognizing that national commitments made in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fall far short of COP21’s overarching climate target — to limit the rise, since preindustrial times, in the Earth’s mean surface temperature to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 — the report advances a set of emissions scenarios that are consistent with achieving that goal.
According to the authors, meeting the 2 C target will require “drastic changes in the global energy mix.” To explore what those changes might entail, MIT Joint Program researchers and contributors from the MIT Energy Initiative and the Energy Innovation Reform Project identify current roadblocks to commercializing key energy technologies and systems, and the breakthroughs needed to make them technically and economically viable.
To project the global environmental impacts of COP21 and model emissions scenarios consistent with the 2 C target, the 2016 Outlookresearchers used the MIT Joint Program’s Integrated Global Systems Modeling (IGSM) framework, a linked set of computer models designed to simulate the global environmental changes that arise due to human causes, and the latest United Nations estimates of the world’s population.
Implications for agriculture and water resources under COP21
Assuming a global emissions path based on COP21, Joint Program researchers used statistical models they developed that replicate complex, numerically demanding globally gridded crop models to project the future productivity of the Earth’s “breadbasket” regions. The projections show overall increased yields through 2100 of maize in the U.S. and wheat in Europe, but taking advantage of these increases would likely require a significant shift northward of farming operations from where these crops are currently produced. The results also show an overall increase for upland rice in Southeast Asia and soybean in Brazil, with a more mixed pattern of yield increases and decreases appearing within these broad regions.
