Food and water and climate change

Abstract

There is a reawakening of the profound challenge of feeding the global population, now forecasting to reach eight to nine billion people by 2050. This is the case irrespective of climate change, because other forms of “planetary overload” deepen the challenge of sufficient and sustainable food production. These include declining areas of unused arable land, the need to preserve forests and other ecosystems not currently used to intensively grow food, flattening crop yields for an increasing number of crops in an increasing number of agroclimatic zones, increasing (crop harming) tropospheric ozone, and emerging phosphate scarcity. In addition, high rates of population growth continue in many regions that are already short of water.