Report: Climate change may spur global food scarcity
Print Edition
LEADING scientists and officials completed a fresh climate report yesterday expected to lay bare the grim impact of climate change, with warnings that global food shortages could spark violence in vulnerable areas.
Part of a massive overview by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set for release today, the report is likely to shape international policy on climate for years to come, and will announce that the impact of global warming is already being felt.
Some 500 scientists and government officials have been gathered since Tuesday in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, to hammer out its wording. It will serve as the second of three volumes into climate change’s causes, consequences and possible solutions by the expert panel.
The work comes six months after the first volume in the long-awaited Fifth Assessment Report declared scientists were more certain than ever that humans caused global warming.
A leaked draft seen by AFP warned that rising greenhouse gas emissions will “significantly” boost the risk of floods while droughts will suck away sustainable water supplies.
A “large fraction” of land and freshwater species may risk extinction, and a warming climate is projected to cut wheat, rice and corn yields, even as food demand rises sharply as the world’s population grows.
Meanwhile hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers around the world will be displaced by the year 2100, the draft said, while the competition for dwindling resources could even spark violent conflicts.
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