Climate Change Reduced Wheat, Corn Yields, U.S. Researchers Say
Climate change reduced wheat and corn yields from 1980 to 2008, U.S. researchers said in a study published in the journal Science.
World wheat production was 5.5 percent lower in that span than it would have been without any change in temperatures and rainfall, the researchers said. Corn output fell 3.8 percent compared to a model without a changing climate, the study showed.
“According to the authors, the drop-off in production may be responsible for the 6 percent rise in food prices since 1980,” Science said. “That’s a $60 billion a year jump in what consumers paid for food.”
World food prices rose to near a record in April as grain costs increased, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said yesterday. Corn and wheat prices more than doubled in the past decade in Chicago trading.
The yield gap was calculated by David B. Lobell from Stanford University, Wolfram Schlenker at Columbia University and Justin Costa-Roberts of the National Bureau of Economic Research. They compared actual production to a model simulating yields for wheat, corn, rice and soybeans since 1980 without climate-change effects.
“Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields that arose from technology, carbon-dioxide fertilization and other factors,” the researchers said.
Soybean and rice yields “remained unaffected on a global scale” by climate change, they found.
Science is published by the Washington-based American Association for the Advancement of Science.
To contact the reporter on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net.
Rate this Page