The minimizing of global warming over the past several years has made one reality true. It's not a matter of whether or not there will be world wide climate change, it's a matter of how much change and how the serious the consequences are. According to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a non-profit research institute working mainly on agriculture in developing countries and the tropics, the consequences will be catastrophic unless new plant varieties that are warm hardy are developed. The shift to the northern latitudes for aerable land (shown in the map above for wheat), will not off-set losses of viability in the tropics.
BBC NEWS
"We're talking about large scale human migration and the return to large-scale famines in developing countries, something which we decided 40 or 50 years ago was unacceptable and did something about."
Raining problems The most significant impact of climate change on agriculture is probably changes in rainfall. Some regions are forecast to receive more rain, others to receive less; above all, it will become more variable.
[...]"The livelihoods of billions of people in developing countries, particularly those in the tropics, will be severely challenged as crop yields decline due to shorter growing seasons," said Robert Zeigler, Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (Irri), a CGIAR affiliate.
Conversely, rising temperatures will open up areas of the world which are currently too cold for crop cultivation, in regions such as Siberia and northern North America. And the same Cimmyt study forecasts that wheat will become viable in parts of Alaska.
But the CGIAR figures suggest that extra yield from these regions will not fill the shortfall in the tropics - added to which there are questions of how poorer tropical countries will afford to buy food from richer temperate states. All this means, CGIAR says, that research into the technological, social and economic dimensions of future farming needs to accelerate.
Climate-proof crops
Boosting photosynthesis of rice is like supercharging a car engine
John Sheehy
Within the CGIAR network, various research initiatives are already under way to develop "climate-proof" varieties.
Clearly, part of the reason that we've heard so little about this is that the major consequences will be felt in the third world, where vulnerable populations already teeter on the brink of starvation and natural disasters. Africa, Bangledesh, SE Asia will bear the brunt of the industrialized world's excesses.
AlterNet
Fourteen percent of the world's population lives in the 57 countries on the African continent. However, because the majority of Africans live with little to no access to electricity and personal transport usage is among the world's lowest, Africans contribute only 3 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
The United States, conversely, with only 5 percent of the world's population, contributes nearly 25 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas pollution annually. In the United States, with our consumption of electricity, our ecologically harmful industries and our 230 million passenger vehicles, we are literally fueling the destruction of the planet's environment.
Last month, at the United Nations Climate Change summit in Nairobi, Kenya, climate change experts from around the globe reported to 165 countries on the impacts of global warming, which will be felt most harshly by poor developing countries. If that weren't bad enough, the former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern recently released a report that suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20 percent over the next 50 years. From the report and the summit, it is clear that climate change is as much a humanitarian, security and economic issue as an environmental one.
After all, it's just dark skinned people who will suffer.
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