Study: Climate Change-Caused Food Scarcity Could Have Dire Consequences

A modeling study recently published in The Lancet suggests that climate change's impact on our food system, and the resulting malnutrition, could cost an additional 500,000 lives per year by 2050.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington D.C. examined deaths from dietary and weight risk factors across 155 global regions under several climate scenarios. The mean projection suggested a 3 percent per person, per day dip in available calories. There will also be a 4-percent decline in fruit and vegetable consumption, and a 0.7-percent tumble in red meat consumption per day. Together these three factors spell trouble for the world's most-vulnerable populations, the researchers said, noting that India and China would be hit the hardest.

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"Even modest reductions in the availability of food per person could lead to changes in the energy content and composition of diets, and these changes will have major consequences for health," lead author Marco Springmann from the University of Oxford said in a statement, according to Reuters. The authors note in the paper that as a result of projections such as these, dietary interventions should be considered as part of the global strategy to combat climate change.

Without climatic variation hampering the food supply, however, global deaths related to malnutrition will actually fall by the year 2050, the authors continued, due to a more robust food system.

The paper's models assume that overall food availability will increase in the coming decades. Without climate change, 3,106 calories of food per person will be available each day in 2050, up from 2,817 now. Taking a mean model of climate change scenarios, this growth will dip to 3,008 calories per person per day in 2050 — an increase over current levels, but a decrease from the ideal level of growth. The “extra” deaths correlated with the drop in calories, then, do not relate to current global mortality levels, just the potential high water mark of food availability.

The bottom is line we know climatic variability will continue to impact agriculture and food supply in the future. But exactly what that looks like remains to be seen.

The paper, “Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change: a modelling study” was published online at TheLancet.com on March 2.

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