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World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy

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Climate Change and Food Security in South Asia

Abstract

Over 1.02 billion people in the world suffer from hunger today. Securing world food security in light of the impact of climate change may be one of the biggest challenges we face in this century. Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Rising temperatures, more intense droughts, floods, and greater weather variability all mean productivity losses to crops and livestock. Greater numbers of crop failures, livestock deaths, forest fires, damage to fishery infrastructure are already imposing economic losses and undermining food security. The overall impacts of climate change on agriculture are expected to be negative, threatening global food security.

Impacts of climate change can influence the whole food supply chain and all four dimensions of food security, namely: availability of food from domestic ­production and imports, access to resources for producing or buying food, stability of food supply, both ecological and macroeconomic, utilization of food, including consumer preferences and safety of water and food. The poor will be disproportionably vulnerable to the effects of climate change because of their greatest dependence on agriculture and their lower ability to adapt. In parallel, growing energy demand is adding additional string and could compete with food security objectives.

The importance of addressing the question of how to increase the resilience of present food production systems to challenges posed by climate change is widely recognized. As importance to bioenergy is growing, the challenges and ­opportunities posed by biofuels, in view of the world’s food security, energy and sustainable development needs to be addressed. In this paper the key challenges of climate change and bioenergy on food security is discussed together with potential ­adaptation and mitigation options and relevant policy priorities elaborated. The key messages from the FAO’s high level conference on “World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy” is presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environment, Climate Change and Bioenergy Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, Rome, 00100, Italy

    S. Ramasamy

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  1. S. Ramasamy
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Correspondence to S. Ramasamy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Coffey Rd 2021, COLUMBUS, 43210-1043, Ohio, USA

    Rattan Lal

  2. Div. Agricultural Meteorology, World Meteorological Organization, avenue de la Paix 7bis, Geneve, 1211, Switzerland

    Mannava V.K. Sivakumar

  3. , Dept. of Soil, Water and Environment, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, 1000, Bangladesh

    S.M.A. Faiz

  4. , Dept. of Soil, Water and Environment, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, 1000, Bangladesh

    A.H.M. Mustafizur Rahman

  5. OARDC Piketon Station, Shyville Road 1864, Piketon, 45661, USA

    Khandakar R. Islam

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Ramasamy, S. (2010). World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy. In: Lal, R., Sivakumar, M., Faiz, S., Mustafizur Rahman, A., Islam, K. (eds) Climate Change and Food Security in South Asia. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9516-9_13

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