The World Bank’s special envoy on climate change says global warming could disrupt the food system “potentially within the next decade,” said the Sydney Morning Herald. Rachel Kyte, a World Bank vice president, spoke at a conference in the Australian capital of Canberra. “The challenges from waste to warming, spurred on by a growing population with a rising middle-class hunger for meat, are leading us down a dangerous path,” she said in prepared remarks. “Unless we chart a new course, we will find ourselves staring volatility and disruption in the food system in the face, not in 2050, not in 2040, but potentially within the next decade.”
Grain yields could fall by one-fifth globally, and by one-half in Africa, if temperatures rise by 2 degrees C, which could occur by the 2030s based on current projections, she said.
“Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points…and that could grow much worse if emissions continue unchecked,” said the New York Times in excerpting the latest draft from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel is combining earlier work on climate change for release in a report in November. The Times says the report uses blunter and more forceful language to highlight the risks of human-caused climate change.
The Obama administration is trying to forge a voluntary agreement that would compel nations around the world to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, says the Times in a companion article. The agreement, to be signed at a U.N. summit in Paris in 2015, would “commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon emissions” while recognizing the U.S. Senate would refuse to ratify a binding accord. “American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges,” said the Times.