Blistering crop-withering temperatures that also risk the health of
agricultural workers could threaten swathes of global food production by 2045
as the world warms, an industry analysis warned Thursday.
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Climate change is already stoking heatwaves and other extreme weather events
across the world, with hot spells from
India to Europe this year expected to
hit crop yields.
Temperature spikes are causing mounting concern for health, particularly for
those working outside in sweltering conditions, which is especially dangerous
when humidity levels are high.
The latest assessment by risk company Verisk Maplecroft brings those two
threats together to calculate that heat stress already poses an "extreme
risk" to agriculture in 20 countries, including agricultural giant India.
But the coming decades are expected to expand the threat to 64 nations by
2045 -- representing 71 percent of current global food production -- including
major economies China, India, Brazil and the United States.
"With the rise in global temperatures and rise in global heat stress,
we're going to see crops in more temperate countries as well start being
affected by this," said Will Nichols, head of climate and resilience at
Verisk Maplecroft.
Rice is particularly at risk, the assessment said, with other crops like
cocoa and even tomatoes also singled out as of concern.
- Growing risk -
Maplecroft's new heat stress dataset, using global temperature data from the
UK Met Office, feeds into its wider risk assessments of countries around the
world.
It is based on a worst-case emissions scenario leading to around 2 degrees
Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels as soon as 2045.
However, the authors stress that in projections to mid-century, even
scenarios that assume higher levels of carbon-cutting action could still result
in temperatures nearing 2C.
India -- responsible for 12 percent of global food production in 2020 and
heavily reliant on outdoor labour productivity -- is already rated as at
extreme risk, the only major agricultural nation in that category at current
temperatures.
"There's a very real worry that people in rural areas, which are
obviously highly dependent on agriculture, are going to be much more vulnerable
to these kinds of heat events going forward," Nichols told AFP.
That could impact productivity and in turn exports -- and have potentially
"cascading" knock-on effects on issues such as the country's credit
rating and even political stability, he said.
By 2045, the list grows much longer.
Nine of the top ten countries affected in 2045 are in Africa, with the
world's second largest cocoa producer Ghana, as well as Togo and Central
African Republic receiving the worst possible risk score.
The top 20 at-risk countries in the coming decades include key Southeast
Asian rice exporters Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, the authors said, noting
that rice farmers in central Vietnam have already taken to working at night to
avoid the high temperatures.
The assessment highlights that major economies like the US and China could
also see extreme risk to agriculture in 2045, although in these large countries
the impacts vary by region.
Meanwhile, Europe accounts for seven of the 10 countries set to see the
largest increase in risk by 2045.
"I think what it reinforces is that, even though a lot of us are sort
of sitting in sort of Western countries, where we might think we're a bit more
insulated from some of these threats, actually we are not necessarily,"
Nichols said.
"Both in terms of the sort of physical risks that we're facing, but
also in terms of the kind
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