The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had in August warned that the world is headed towards dangerous consequences of climate change that will affect life and livelihoods on a global scale. A new report hints at how the food supply will be hit as the planet experiences extreme weather events.
Led by Nasa, the study hints at the increasing chances of crop failure and wildfires, and other hazards to society as the world experiences increased bouts of heatwaves, drought, and excessive rainfall. The study states that by the year 2100 the risk to corn harvests in at least three of the world’s six major corn-growing regions will double.
Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the findings put the US Midwest at the highest risk of being the site of one of these multiple harvest failures. Researchers looked at maize-breadbasket regions of Central North America, Northeast Brazil, Southern South America, Central Europe, East Asia, and South Asia, which has about 55 per cent of global maize production.
The report found "extreme heat events occurring on three or more consecutive days increase in frequency by 100%300%, and consecutive extreme rain events increase in most regions, nearly doubling for some." Climate scientists have been working for years to understand and represent these complex chains of interacting events numerically in climate models.
Colin Raymond, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the study that focused on how the increased clustering of both temperature and precipitation hazards will affect corn. The model simulations showed that by 2100, extreme heatwaves around the world lasting at least three days will occur two to four times as often as they do now. Three-day extremes in rainfall will generally increase by 10% to 50% in frequency.
“It’s only in the last five or so years that a framework has been developed for applying compound-risk thinking to climate analysis in a way that you can actually compute without getting in hopelessly over your head," Colin Raymond said in a statement.
The researchers looked at how all of these changes combined could affect future corn harvests, using the relationship between climate extremes in heat and rainfall and past crop failures as a guide.
"By their best estimate, the chance that a cluster of events will cause corn crops to fail in at least three of the world’s breadbaskets in the same year will nearly double, from 29% to 57%, by the year 2100," Nasa said adding that the chance that harvests will fail in the five largest breadbasket regions in a single year will grow even more significantly from 0.6% to 5.4%.
Source - https://www.indiatoday.in
