U.S. agriculture escaped impacts of global warming -- for now
set in, but this study suggests that would be misguided,” Lobell said.
Since 1950 the average global temperature has increased at a rate of roughly 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. But over the next two to three decades average global temperature is expected to rise approximately 50 percent faster than that, according to the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With that rate of temperature change, it is unlikely that the crop-growing regions of the United States will continue to escape the rising temperatures, Lobell said.
“The climate science is still unclear about why summers in the Corn Belt haven’t been warming. But most explanations suggest that warming in the future is just as likely there as elsewhere in the world,” Lobell said.
“In other words, farmers in the Corn Belt seem to have been lucky so far.”
This is the first study to come up with a global estimate for the past 30 years of what has been happening, Lobell said.
To develop their estimates, the researchers used publicly available global data sets from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and from the University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, and McGill University.
The researchers also estimated the economic effects of the changes in crop yield using models of commodity markets.
“We found that since 1980, the effects of climate change on crop yields have caused an increase of approximately 20 percent in global market prices,” said Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University and a coauthor of the paper in Science.
He said if the beneficial effects of higher carbon dioxide levels on crop growth are factored into the calculation, the increase drops down to 5 percent.
“Five percent sounds small until you realize that at current prices world production of these four crops are together worth nearly $1 trillion per year,” Schlenker said. “So a price increase of 5 percent implies roughly $50 billion per year more spent on food.”
Rising commodity prices have so far benefited American farmers, Lobell and Schlenker said, because they haven’t suffered the relative declines in crop yield that the rest of the world has been experiencing.
“It will be interesting to see what happens over the next decade in North America,” Lobell said. “But to me the key message is not necessarily the specifics of each country. I think the real take-home message is that climate change is not just about the future, but that it is affecting agriculture now. Accordingly, efforts to adapt agriculture such as by developing more heat- and drought-tolerant crops will have big payoffs, even today. ”
Justin Costa-Roberts, an undergraduate student at Stanford, is also a coauthor of the Science paper. David Lobell is a researcher in Stanford’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Schlenker is an assistant professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and at the Department of Economics at Columbia
— Read more in David B. Lobell et al., “Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980,” Science (5 May 2011) (DOI: 10.1126/science.1204531)
