The Foods the World Will Lose to Climate Change

In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didnt flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared...

In 2019, the Global Commission on Adaptationan independent research group sponsored by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationpredicted that climate change would reduce farming yields by up to 30 percent by 2050, and that the impact would fall hardest on the 500 million small farmers worldwide..

That same year, scientists from Australia and the US found that shocks to food productionsudden unpredicted drops in productivityhave increased every year since the 1960s, and a research team in Zurich showed that extreme heat waves stretching across nations at the same latitudesrare before 2010are becoming common...

There will definitely be disproportionality between wealthier countries gaining more favorable climates to grow crops and countries in the global south that heavily rely on crops as a significant part of their income, says Robert Fofrich, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLAs Institute of the Environment and Sustainability..

And in a lot of western Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and a growing amount of Kansas, we are more limited by water than land.. Millet isnt the only crop that may be better suited to new climate conditions; researchers and farmers in the Midwest have also been trial-growing oil seeds such as canola and sunflowers, fiber plants such as hemp, other components of birdseed, and even another type of millet, known as pearl millet, which thrives in temperatures that kill corn pollen..

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