UN Climate Report: Change Land Use to Avoid a Hungry Future - NECN
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UN Climate Report: Change Land Use to Avoid a Hungry Future

"The way we use land is both part of the problem and also part of the solution," said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a French climate scientist



    UN Climate Report: Change Land Use to Avoid a Hungry Future
    Nati Harnik/AP
    This Monday, July 30, 2018 file photo shows rows of soybean plants in a field near Bennington, Neb. A report by the United Nations released on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2019 says that human-caused climate change is dramatically degrading the planet’s land, while the way people use the Earth is making global warming worse. The vicious cycle is already making food more expensive, scarcer and even less nutritious, as well as cutting the number of species on Earth, according to a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    Human-caused climate change is dramatically degrading the Earth's land and the way people use the land is making global warming worse, a new United Nations scientific report says. That creates a vicious cycle which is already making food more expensive, scarcer and less nutritious.

    "The cycle is accelerating," said NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, a co-author of the report. "The threat of climate change affecting people's food on their dinner table is increasing."



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    "The way we use land is both part of the problem and also part of the solution," said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a French climate scientist who co-chairs one of the panel's working groups. "Sustainable land management can help secure a future that is comfortable."

    Scientists at Thursday's press conference emphasized both the seriousness of the problem and the need to make societal changes soon.

    "We don't want a message of despair," said science panel official Jim Skea, a professor at Imperial College London. "We want to get across the message that every action makes a difference."


    "I've lost a lot of sleep about what the science is saying. As a person, it's pretty scary," Koko Warner, a manager in the U.N. Climate Change secretariat who helped write a report chapter on risk management and decision-making, told The Associated Press after the report was presented at the World Meteorological Organization headquarters in Geneva. "We need to act urgently."

    The report said climate change already has worsened land degradation, caused deserts to grow, permafrost to thaw and made forests more vulnerable to drought, fire, pests and disease. That's happened even as much of the globe has gotten greener because of extra carbon dioxide in the air. Climate change has also added to the forces that have reduced the number of species on Earth.

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    "Climate change is really slamming the land," said World Resources Institute researcher Kelly Levin, who wasn't part of the study.

    And the future could be worse.

    "The stability of food supply is projected to decrease as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt food chains increases," the report said.

    In the worst-case scenario, food security problems change from moderate to high risk with just a few more tenths of a degree of warming from now. They go from high to "very high" risk with just another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of warming from now.

    "The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing," NASA's Rosenzweig said. "Just to give examples, the crop yields were effected in Europe just in the last two weeks."


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    The science panel said they aren't telling people what to eat because that's a personal choice.

    Still, Hans-Otto Pörtner, a panel leader from Germany who said he lost weight and felt better after reducing his meat consumption, told a reporter that if she ate less ribs and more vegetables "that's a good decision and you will help the planet reduce greenhouse gas emissions."


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    "Currently 25%-30% of total food produced is lost or wasted," the report said. Fixing that would free up millions of square miles of land.

    With just another 0.9 degrees F of warming (0.5 degrees C), which could happen in the next 10 to 30 years, the risk of unstable food supplies, wildfire damage, thawing permafrost and water shortages in dry areas "are projected to be high," the report said.

    At another 1.8 degrees F of warming (1 degree C) from now, which could happen in about 50 years, it said those risks "are projected to be very high."

    Most scenarios predict the world's tropical regions will have "unprecedented climatic conditions by the mid-to-late 21st century," the report noted.


    But the land is also a great carbon "sink," which sucks heat-trapping gases out of the air.


    "This additional gift from nature is limited. It's not going to continue forever," said study co-author Luis Verchot, a scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia. "If we continue to degrade ecosystems, if we continue to convert natural ecosystems, we continue to deforest and we continue to destroy our soils, we're going to lose this natural subsidy."


    Recent forest management changes in Brazil "contradicts all the messages that are coming out of the report," Pörtner said.

    Saying "our current way of living and our economic system risks our future and the future of our children," Germany's environment minister, Svenja Schulze, questioned whether it makes sense for a country like Germany to import large amounts of soy from Latin America, where forests are being destroyed to plant the crop, to feed unsustainable numbers of livestock in Germany.

    "We ought to recognize that we have profound limits on the amount of land available and we have to be careful about how we utilize it," said Stanford University environmental sciences chief Chris Field, who wasn't part of the report.

