Climate change is reducing agricultural productivity
Technology is improving productivity, but climate is slowing it down.
Researchers have quantified for the first time the impact of climate change on global agricultural productivity, and it’s bad: the sector is 21% down from where it could have been without the growing emissions. That’s the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s, the researchers estimated.
Image credit: Flickr / StateOfIsrael
Enhancing agricultural productivity is vital not just for feeding the world, but also for lifting global living standards. Investments in agricultural research have boosted agricultural productivity in the past decades in several ways, but this has been distributed unequally across the world with growing signs that progress is slowing down in certain regions.
A thorough inventory of the sector’s emissions underlined just how much agriculture contributes to our greenhouse gas emissions. If we want to avoid catastrophic damage, we’d be wise to address this, researchers say.
Image credit: Flickr / StateOfIsrael
Land-use and agriculture emissions are on the rise in most countries and this could cause the world to fail its climate targets, which could cause devastating damage for the entire planet.
Historically, human land use has affected the environment in multiple ways: it transformed and fragmented ecosystems, degraded biodiversity, disrupted carbon and nitrogen cycles, and added emissions to the atmosphere. But in contrast to fossil-fuels, trends and drivers of emissions from land-use change haven’t been analyzed as thoroughly.