This week, IoM Friends of the Earth’s Co-Ordinator Cat Turner reflects on the recent visit by Professor Thomas Stocker of the IPCC, and looks at how a changing climate will affect our weekly shopping choices
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Many readers will have been lucky enough to hear Professor Thomas Stocker of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when he visited the island at the invitation of Department of the Environment, Food and Agriculture and spoke to politicians, business people and the general public.
Credit’s due to the government for attracting such a high-profile speaker to share his knowledge on this, possibly the most important issue our generation will face.
For those who didn’t attend his talk, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxMvXKp-fNs&list=UUAJ6-lntI73xR8ioRI5i-OA
That visit has provoked lots of discussion – on the island’s contribution to climate change and its mitigation, and on the impacts we’ll suffer, dependent on what actions we and other nations take.
Professor Stocker focussed on the science evidencing climate change, and others of his colleagues, in subsequent papers, have taken the discussion on to look at what the impacts are likely to be, and what we (humankind) can do.
It’s sobering stuff – the IPCC concludes that climate impacts have already hammered the world’s food supply, and we’re seeing it in escalating food price inflation, here and abroad.
Food price inflation is one of the biggest factors in the island’s own inflation figures.
The IPCC also concludes that this is likely to lead to more conflicts, as starving people rebel against a situation they’re not, in the main, themselves responsible for.
‘All aspects of food security are potentially affected by climate change,’ the panel observes.
This is bad news – but it may at least be the point at which people are sufficiently affected themselves, personally, to start taking things seriously, and to start taking serious action. Climate change isn’t a remote threat any more, one which appears in the abstract via geography lessons and learned pieces in science journals.
Virginia Burkett is also on the panel, and she points out that ‘it’s about people now, it’s more relevant to the man on the street. It’s more relevant to communities because the impacts are directly affecting people – not just butterflies and sea ice’.
How so? Well, the IPCC found that, worldwide, the rate of increase in crop yields is significantly slowing.
This is especially the case with wheat, on which so much of the processed food we’ve become accustomed to buying is based.
This is increasing worries about how food production will keep pace with a rising global population (although as regular readers of this economy, and those who heard speaker Tristram Stuart when he visited the Island earlier this year, much of the world’s hunger could be avoided by cutting food waste, improving food distribution and access, and reverting to less intensive agricultural systems).
In any event, the IPCC forecast that changes in the climate – manifesting themselves in new temperature and rainfall patterns – could mean food price increases of up to 84 per cent by 2050.
Another panel member, Princeton Professor Michael Oppenheimer, put it thus: ‘Climate change is acting as a brake. We need yields to grow to meet growing demand, but already climate change is slowing those yields.’
Similar things are happening to corn yields, too – though wheat is especially significant as it’s sensitive to temperature and is such a key crop right around the globe.
And it’s not just agricultural yields that are suffering – the IPCC says that fish catches in some parts of the world (especially the tropics) are likely to plummet by 40 to 60 pe rcent. An increase in price will hurt many of us, but more importantly, these figures mean that the species are, in effect, running out.
Is it all bad news? Surely where some areas are badly affected, others must improve?
Well, yes. The IPCC does confirm that there some places where a longer growing season is actually on the cards; but it notes that these are ‘isolated’ and scotches any suggestion that climate change could actually be advantageous, saying: ‘Negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts.’
Of course, there are many other effects from climate change – we’re all familiar with the increased intensity, and frequence, of extreme weather events – even here on the island. And floods, storms, freezes, heatwaves and droughts are predicted to be on the rise.
As ever, it’ll be the poor, elderly and weak who will bear the brunt of this – though no-one will be unaffected.
The IPCC was at pains to point out that where governments are unprepared to deal with these consequences, war and conflict is likely to erupt.
It all sounds remote and unlikely, but clearly we’re ‘in’ this unfolding drama right now, and we need to find ways of dealing with it.
As Tim Gore, head of food policy at Oxfam, has said: ‘The main way that most people will experience climate change is through the impact on food: the food they eat, the price they pay for it, and the availability and choice that they have.’
And our own Andy Atkins, head of Friends of the Earth in the UK, says: ‘Giant strides are urgently needed to tackle the challenges we face, but all we get is tiny steps, excuses and delays from most of the politicians that are supposed to represent our interests.
‘Governments across the world must stand up to the oil, gas and coal industries, and take their foot off the fossil fuel accelerator that’s speeding us towards a climate disaster.’
So any efforts made by local policymakers to increase our island’s own food security – by supporting local producers, protecting the state of our agricultural land and our biodiversity, fostering good production practices – is to be applauded.
And so are the positive choices made by you and me, the consumers.
Because one day, all those imported and processed food ‘products’ may be just too expensive – both financially and environmentally – for us and for the planet.