Andy Jarvis is the Program Leader for the Decision and Policy Analysis program in the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and a scientist for Biodiversity International.  He is a geographer by training, with a PhD from the University of London, and his research recently has focused on geographic modeling of the impacts of climate change on agricultural systems.  He has published over 20 scientific articles in his 10 year career, and recently won the 2009 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Award for innovative research in biosystematics and bioinformatics, in part for his research on the threats climate change pose on agricultural biodiversity.

Many of us take for granted that as long as we have money we can still buy food. But the reality is much more complicated. If we were to look at the time and energy involved in producing our bowl of breakfast cereal, or worse still a chicken soup, then we’d be shocked not only by the complexity of the global food production system, but also the fragility of it. Growing and selling food depends on a huge number of people, inputs and processes, from producers and buyers, through to infrastructure for transport, distributors and retailers. But if you were to select the most important factors that the rest of the system depends on, they would be good land and a favorable climate. The latter is now under threat.

With an increasing world population, and rising demand for meat and dairy products (which are much more wasteful in land and other input requirements) producing enough food is already a challenge. And to top it off we also have to deal with a rapidly changing climate. There are currently 1 billion hungry people in the world and the number is rising. The plight of these, and the millions of others who are already being hit hard by climate change, is highlighted in a new report published by Oxfam today. The report ‘Suffering the Science’ highlights how erratic weather, in combination with other pressures, has resulted in failed harvests and increasing hunger across the developing world.

So what should we do?  At the International Science Congress in Copenhagen earlier this year, I was asked what I would do if I had US$1m. I jokingly replied that I would bribe some politicians to commit to radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions when their countries meet in the same city in December, to hammer out a climate deal. But the truth is that the single most important investment society must make - right now - is to ensure that the deal struck in Copenhagen takes a major stance on curbing emissions. Whether it takes a million or a billion dollars or more. One single dollar spent today will avoid countless dollars of economic losses and serious human suffering in the future. We must act now, at the political level, to drastically cut emissions and keep below the 2^oC “safety zone” for increases in temperature. If we don’t, it will create innumerable challenges for our food system.  

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop in December. No matter what, we’re going to have to confront the growing challenge of climate change. We should have acted 50 years ago, but back then we were clueless about how we were damaging our planet. Now we have the knowledge and the scientific proof - we have to act now. Tackling emissions is just the beginning. Agriculture needs to become “eco-efficient” and use resources and inputs more sustainably.

We at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have been looking at a range of scenarios for the likely impact of climate change on agriculture. I’d like to highlight one study we did in Latin America, on coffee. In Colombia alone, there are over half a million smallholder coffee farmers who depend on the crop. In Central America, coffee is the second greatest source of rural income for the 20m-or-so farmers in the region. If you take into account the associated rural businesses that buy, transport, process and export the crop, you realise that coffee is a major contributor to GDP for most countries in the region. We looked into the future of coffee production in Central America, to see what climate change has in store. The findings are shocking. For example, Nicaragua will lose half of its potential coffee-growing area if temperatures increase by 2^oC. That means a large proportion of the country’s GDP will be wiped out and 2.5 million rural coffee farmers will have to find an alternative means of feeding their children. And for all you coffee lovers out there, we find the first thing to disappear is quality. So as the world acquires a taste for decent coffee, climate change will reduce significantly the global capacity to produce a quality cuppa. And that means higher prices for the consumers.

So what do we do about it? Well first, lobby and campaign for serious curbs in emissions when world leaders discuss ways to tackle climate change at the end of the year. Then we need to identify the most vulnerable elements in our food system, and work with farmers to help them adapt to the changes that are coming.  As a global society, we need to prepare ourselves for a very challenging future.