Climate change will likely threaten crop yield

Climate change will not only bring more frequent extreme weather events and cause significant sea level rise but is also very likely to threaten crop yield which could in years to come lead to even more hunger in the world. This is because climate change will likely make plants more sensitive to infectious diseases.

Many scientists such as Dr Newton from the James Hutton Institute, Dundee, Scotland, are warning the world that fighting these infectious diseases will be the key in avoiding more hunger in years to come. Dr Newton believes that the best option to avoid the major threat to crop yield in years to come is to exploit diversity in crops because this increases resilience to microbes and other stresses caused by climate change.

In order to exploit diversity in crops scientists need to learn the complex interaction between microbes and plants and to "understand the dynamics of complex microbial communities and their interactions to be able to predict the likelihood of disease".

Knowing these interactions will be a key in improving the future crop production and probably the only way to reduce the climate change's negative impact on the price and availability of food.

According to the latest reports a successful pest and disease management was a main contributor in doubling the food production in the last 40 years, but on the other hand 10-16% of the global harvest is still lost because of different plant diseases. The increased climate change impact will likely give significant boost to micro-organisms that cause these diseases so science will no doubt have an extremely hard task to keep these pests away from the crops.

The well known climate change indicators such as higher temperatures and increased levels of carbon dioxide will not only affect existing plant microbes but also create the ideal conditions for the appearance of new microbes. Reliable crop production will likely be put under great jeopardy in years to come.

Global warming very likely to cause hunger in years to come

According to the newest study by David Battisti, a climatologist at the University of Washington that used 23 models vetted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change there is a 90% chance that average temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be higher than the hottest heat waves of the past century. This will cause hunger to approximately 3 billion people that live in these areas because most of these people are dependent on locally produced crops for both food and income, and they will be literally forced to choose between going hungry or moving to milder climate areas.

Even now there are many hungry people around the world, and in the years to come we could see a real catastrophe. Global food markets have already started showing some signs of weakness and the future food supply will likely turn into the catastrophe if current warming trend continues.

Tropics and subtropics will be worst hit areas, but unfortunately not the only ones. If current warming trend continues heat wave that caused more than 50,000 people in Europe in 2003 will become standard somewhere around 2080. Our future looks to be heading in the completely wrong direction...