How Climate Change Will Affect What We Eat?
Climate change could cost us one in six species of animal. It is certainly going to change the way farming is carried out across the world. The hope is that resurrection plants can be used to allow crops to cope for long periods without water and University of Cape Towns’ Jill Farrant is exploring this.
Climate change could cost us one in six species of animal. It is certainly going to change the way farming is carried out across the world. The hope is that resurrection plants can be used to allow crops to cope for long periods without water and University of Cape Towns’ Jill Farrant is exploring this.
These plants are able to come back from the dead, and further good news is that rumours of food crops going extinct are exaggerated. All will be able to grow somewhere according to CGIAR Research Programmes leader Andrew Jarvis.High quality chocolate will be less available in the future, and if you want it, you’ll have to pay a lot more for it
There is however bad news as some crops will have to be grown elsewhere and the local area will be affected. Access to items will change, and the level to which the changes occur will depend upon how hot things become with temperatures of over 30 degrees causing major problems. Professor Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University uses soybean and corn as examples.
READ ALSO: Germany Needs to Build 3,000 Wind Turbines To Replace a Nuclear Power Plant
About 4% of the world’s croplands experience drought in any given year, but by the end of the century, this figure is projected to jump to about 18% per year.
Companies are working to improve things as the Gates Foundation are working towards producing crops that can cope with drought and unusual temperatures. Genetic engineering is the future, and yet it is not the final solution.
80% of coffee-growing zones in Central America and Brazil could become unsuitable by 2050
Sure current farming methods will help, and this can be things as basic as using a little extra fertilizer to improving irrigation methods. There would be a vast improvement just as a result of using what is available better.
A final solution would be to change our diet and not rely on products such as corn, wheat and rice which are all sensitive to heat.
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Daniel Okafor
Daniel Okafor is the Senior AI Reporter at TrendinTech, where he covers large language models, machine learning research and the practical use of artificial intelligence across business and government. He previously reported on artificial intelligence for MIT Technology Review, covering the labs behind the current generation of frontier models and the policy debates in Washington and Brussels. Daniel holds a Master of Science in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University and follows the research community closely, attending NeurIPS and ICML each year to speak with the people behind the papers. He has a particular interest in evaluation: how models are benchmarked, where those benchmarks fail and what that means for the companies betting on them.
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