FARMING,

Agriculture is likely to find itself caught in the crosshairs in the wake of the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC)

Limiting global warming to 1.5ºc would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, according to the IPCC’S assessment made public yesterday in Korea.

With farming likely to be one of the major industries hit by climate change, it was also one of the areas likely to be targeted by pol- icy and regulatory changes designed to curb emissions of greenhouse gases – but it was accepted that getting the balance between this and increasingly fragile food security was likely to be a tricky tightrope to walk.

Yesterdays’ report indicated that limiting global warming to 1.5°C, compared with 2ºc, would result in smaller falls in yields of maize, rice, wheat, and potentially other cereal crops around the globe – with reductions in projected food availability being considerably larger at 2ºc than at 1.5°C, especially in the Sahel, southern Africa, the Mediterranean, central Europe, and the Amazon. Livestock were also projected to be adversely affected by rising temperatures, with the effects dependant on the extent of changes in feed quality, spread of diseases, and water resource availability.

The panel also warned that moves to reduce warming often relied heavily on the deployment of large-scale land-related measures like afforestation and bioenergy supply. However the report stated that if these measures were poorly managed they could compete with food production – a fact which risked raising further food security concerns.