By Rob Mitchum
With a worldwide population projected to top nine billion in the next 30 years, the amount of food produced globally will need to double. A new study from researchers at the University of Birmingham and the Center for Robust Decision-Making on Climate and Energy Policy (RDCEP) shows that much of the land currently used to grow wheat, maize and rice is vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This could lead to a major drop in productivity of these areas by 2050, along with a corresponding increase in potential productivity of many previously-unused areas, pointing to a major shift in the map of global food production.
The study, published in Nature Communications, uses a new approach combining standard climate change models with maximum land productivity data, to predict how the potential productivity of cropland is likely to change over the next 50-100 years as a result of climate change. Among the study’s co-authors are Joshua Elliott, CI fellow and RDCEP research scientist, and RDCEP postdoctoral researcher Delphine Deryng…
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