Suchergebnisse

Climate risks pose a threat to the function of the global food system and therefore also a hazard to the global financial sector, the stability of governments, and the food security and health of the world's population. This paper presents a method to assess plausible impacts of an agricultural production shock and potential materiality for global insurers. A hypothetical, near-term, plausible, extreme scenario was developed based upon modules of historical agricultural production shocks, linked under a warm phase El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) meteorological framework. The scenario included teleconnected floods and droughts in disparate agricultural production regions around the world, as well as plausible, extreme biotic shocks. In this scenario, global crop yield declines of 10% for maize, 11% for soy, 7% for wheat and 7% for rice result in quadrupled commodity prices and commodity stock fluctuations, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences and major financial losses worldwide. This work illustrates a need for the scientific community to partner across sectors and industries towards better-integrated global data, modeling and analytical capacities, to better respond to and prepare for concurrent agricultural failure. Governments, humanitarian organizations and the private sector collectively may recognize significant benefits from more systematic assessment of exposure to agricultural climate risk.

La Commission sur l'agriculture durable et le changement climatique a examiné les données scientifiques pour identifier un moyen d'atteindre la sécurité alimentaire dans le contexte du changement climatique. Les systèmes alimentaires doivent évoluer de façon à mieux répondre aux besoins humains et, à long terme, s'équilibrer avec les ressources planétaires. Cette évolution nécessitera des interventions majeures tant au niveau local qu'à l'échelle mondiale afin de transformer les modèles actuels de production, de distribution et de consommation alimentaire. L'investissement, l'innovation et un effort délibéré visant à rendre autonomes les populations les plus vulnérables du monde seront nécessaires pour construire un système alimentaire mondial qui s'adapte au changement climatique et assure la sécurité alimentaire tout en minimisant les émissions de gaz à effet de serre et en conservant notre stock de ressources naturelles. Un accroissement important des investissements dans l'agriculture durable, notamment dans une amélioration de l'infrastructure de base et une restauration des écosystèmes dégradés, constitue un composant essentiel du développement économique à long terme. Plus tôt ces mesures seront prises, plus importants en seront les effets.

Business as usual in our globally interconnected food system will not bring us food security and environmental sustainability. Several converging threats – from climate change, population growth and unsustainable use of resources – are steadily intensifying pressure on humanity and world governments to transform the way food is produced, distributed and consumed.

Dans le système alimentaire mondialement interconnecté qui est le nôtre, le statu quo ne nous apportera ni sécurité alimentaire ni durabilité environnementale. Entre le changement climatique, la croissance démographique et l'insoutenabilité de notre consommation des ressources, plusieurs menaces convergentes imposent de plus en plus et de façon constante à l'humanité et aux gouvernements mondiaux un changement des modes de production, de distribution et de consommation de la nourriture.

Agriculture is considered to be "climate-smart" when it contributes to increasing food security, adaptation and mitigation in a sustainable way. This new concept now dominates current discussions in agricultural development because of its capacity to unite the agendas of the agriculture, development and climate change communities under one brand. In this opinion piece authored by scientists from a variety of international agricultural and climate research communities, we argue that the concept needs to be evaluated critically because the relationship between the three dimensions is poorly understood, such that practically any improved agricultural practice can be considered climate-smart. This lack of clarity may have contributed to the broad appeal of the concept. From the understanding that we must hold ourselves accountable to demonstrably better meet human needs in the short and long term within foreseeable local and planetary limits, we develop a conceptualization of climate-smart agriculture as agriculture that can be shown to bring us closer to safe operating spaces for agricultural and food systems across spatial and temporal scales. Improvements in the management of agricultural systems that bring us significantly closer to safe operating spaces will require transformations in governance and use of our natural resources, underpinned by enabling political, social and economic conditions beyond incremental changes. Establishing scientifically credible indicators and metrics of long-term safe operating spaces in the context of a changing climate and growing social-ecological challenges is critical to creating the societal demand and political will required to motivate deep transformations. Answering questions on how the needed transformational change can be achieved will require actively setting and testing hypotheses to refine and characterize our concepts of safer spaces for social-ecological systems across scales. This effort will demand prioritizing key areas of innovation, such as (1) improved adaptive management and governance of social-ecological systems; (2) development of meaningful and relevant integrated indicators of social-ecological systems; (3) gathering of quality integrated data, information, knowledge and analytical tools for improved models and scenarios in time frames and at scales relevant for decision-making; and (4) establishment of legitimate and empowered science policy dialogues on local to international scales to facilitate decision making informed by metrics and indicators of safe operating spaces.