Risk of increased food insecurity under stringent global climate change mitigation policy

• DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0230-x
• Publication Date: 2018-07-24T10:43:57Z
• Authors: Tomoko Hasegawa; Shinichiro Fujimori; Petr Havlík; Hugo Valin; Benjamin Leon Bod...; Jonathan C. Doelman; Thomas Fellmann; Page Kyle; Jason F. L. Koopman; Hermann Lotze-Campen; Daniel Mason-D’Croz; Yuki Ochi; Ignacio Pérez Dom...; Elke Stehfest; Timothy B. Sulser; Andrzej Tabeau; Kiyoshi Takahashi; Jun’ya Takakura; Hans van Meijl; Willem-Jan van Zeist; Keith Wiebe; Peter Witzke
• Keywords: Food Prices

Food insecurity can be directly exacerbated by climate change due to crop-production-related impacts of warmer and drier conditions that are expected in important agricultural regions1–3. However, efforts to mitigate climate change through comprehensive, economy-wide GHG emissions reductions may also negatively affect food security, due to indirect impacts on prices and supplies of key agricultural commodities4–6. Here we conduct a multiple model assessment on the combined effects of climate change and climate mitigation efforts on agricultural commodity prices, dietary energy availability and the population at risk of hunger. A robust finding is that by 2050, stringent climate mitigation policy, if implemented evenly across all sectors and regions, would have a greater negative impact on global hunger and food consumption than the direct impacts of climate change. The negative impacts would be most prevalent in vulnerable, low-income regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where food security problems are already acute.