Food securityHumanity’s Ability to Feed Itself Under Growing Threat

A new UN report warns that the world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” and that the combination of this increasingly more rapid exploitation with climate change is putting dire – and threatening — pressure on the ability of mankind to feed itself.

The report was prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a summary of the report in Geneva on Thursday.

The report found that half-billion people already live in regions which are turning into desert, and that arable soil is being lost at a rate between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming.

Climate change exacerbates all these threats, making them worse, and doing so quickly: floods, drought, storms, and other types of extreme weather continue to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population is undernourished, and some experts involved in writing the report have warned that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration, and to inter-state and intra-state conflicts.

Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report, told the New York Times that one particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”

“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors, told the Times. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”