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Climate Change and Food Security pp 13–30Cite as

Climate Effects on Food Security: An Overview

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Part of the book series: Advances in Global Change Research ((AGLO,volume 37))

Abstract

There are roughly 1 billion food insecure people in the world today, each having this status because food is unavailable to them, because it is unaffordable, or because they are too unhealthy to make use of it – or some combination of the three. Assessing the potential effects of climate change on food security requires understanding the underlying determinants of these three aspects of food security – availability, access, and utilization – and how climate change might affect each. This chapter explores these aspects and determinants of food security, summarizing the basic mechanisms by which climate change might impact the lives of the global food insecure.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for example, the RIGA project (Davis et al. 2007, Ivanic and Martin 2008), IFPRI’s HarvesChoice Project, Stanford’s ALP Project, and Banerjee and Duflo (2007).

  2. 2.

    There are cases where the longer-run effects of high prices might actually benefit net consumers, for instance if in response to the incentives of higher prices they are able to expand their own production and become net sellers of food, or if higher food prices induce expansion of production on other farms and raise the total demand for agricultural wage labor. For a more complete treatment of these longer-run dynamics, please see Singh et al. (1986).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Marshall Burke & David Lobell

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  1. Marshall Burke
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  2. David Lobell
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  1. Stanford University, CA, USA

    David Lobell  & Marshall Burke  & 

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Burke, M., Lobell, D. (2010). Climate Effects on Food Security: An Overview. In: Lobell, D., Burke, M. (eds) Climate Change and Food Security. Advances in Global Change Research, vol 37. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2953-9_2

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