The headline in the Telegraph is both remarkable and irresponsible.
Climate change threatens UK harvest
The article is about a new paper in Environmental Research Letters:
Increased crop failure due to climate change: assessing adaptation options using models and socio-economic data for wheat in China
Andrew J Challinor, Elisabeth S Simelton, Evan D G Fraser, Debbie Hemming and Mathew Collins Environ. Res. Lett.5 034012 doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/3/034012
This paper deals with simulations of crop failures due to heat and water stress in North east China, where the simulations are themselves based on climate model output taken from the coupled atmosphere–ocean simulations of the Hadley centre for the period 1990 – 2099. The base-line for climate was for the period 1950-1989.
Grain crops China: Xinhua News Agency
The authors conclude that based on their simulations
The results from this study suggest that climate change will result in increasing spring wheat crop failure in northeast Chinadue to increasing extremes of both heat and water stress.
But the authors also studied socio-economic adaptation factors. Access to capital and land, increasing fertilizer, per capita investments in agriculture, and falling numbers of rural households all of which reduce vulnerability. They find that “measures to adapt may include institutional policies to support adaptation; schemes to ensure that the requisitecrop varieties are available to farmers; crop insuranceschemes or weather derivatives to aid management ofclimate variability; plant breeding; and building capacity foragricultural extension services to effectively prepare farmers for extreme events”. They go on to conclude that
The simulations show significant potential for adaptation throughboth socio-economic and biophysical measures. The methods used could form part of a methodology to link climate andcrop models, socio-economic analyses and crop variety trialdata. By examining at the regional scale the range of abioticstresses likely to be experienced by crop production systemsin the future, the relative importance of these stresses couldbe determined using a risk-based or probabilistic framework.This work could in turn be used with analyses of current andpotential future germplasm, and socio-economic conditions,in order to prioritize efforts to adapt regional-scale cropproduction to climate change, using a range of measures suchas policy, plant breeding and biotechnology.
But The Telegraph somehow can only see the alarmist side. They also manage to bring the UK Met Office into the story and create a remarkable headline from these simulations of North East China! Louise Gray writes:
Climate change threatens UK harvest
Climate change could push up food prices by causing large-scale crop failures in Britain, the Met Office has warned. Rising temperatures could mean events such as the drought in Russia this summer, which pushed up grain prices, hit countries like the UK.
The k2p blog 