Comment on food security and climate change paper

Commenting on a paper Risk of increased food insecurity under stringent global climate change mitigation policy by Tomoko Hasegawa et al., to be published in Nature Climate Change on Monday 30 July [1], Dr Camilla Toulmin, Senior Associate at the at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Professor at Lancaster University, said:

“This paper raises important questions, because poorly designed climate policy can affect food production, as we saw with large tracts allocated to biofuel production.

“But as the researchers themselves admit, in the real world it’s not an ‘either-or’ – in fact it can’t be, because climate change itself will create increasing damage if carbon emissions are not curbed.

“The good news, which the research methods used in this paper seem to miss, is that good policies can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while safeguarding food production, as we see happening now on all kinds of farms with practices such as minimum tillage and better management and incorporation of organic wastes in soils.

“Above all we could and should be eliminating food waste, which accounts for one-third to one-half of agricultural production in some countries and would bring multiple benefits beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Also commenting on the paper, Guy Smith, Vice President of the National Farmers Union, said:

“Try telling any farmer in northern Europe right now that climate change isn’t a big deal for food production and see how far you get – we’re all struggling, from Ireland across to Estonia, in a heatwave that we know climate change has made more likely.

“A computer model is after all a ‘model’, so it can’t include all the realities that we deal with day to day in our fields, where we are finding ways to make farming more productive as well as seeing the impacts of climate change at first hand.

“The fact is we want to play our part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from farming while we keep producing food – and we can. It is not an ‘either-or’ question.”