In a new study, researchers found that unless steps are taken to mitigate climate change, up to 60 percent of current wheat-growing areas worldwide could see simultaneous, severe and prolonged droughts by the end of the century.
In a new study, researchers found that unless steps are taken to mitigate climate change, up to 60 percent of current wheat-growing areas worldwide could see simultaneous, severe and prolonged droughts by the end of the century. Wheat is the world’s largest rain-fed crop in terms of harvested area and supplies about 20 percent of all calories consumed by humans.
The risk of widespread drought in wheat production areas is four times the level scientists see today, said Song Feng, associate professor of geosciences and the second author on the study published in the journal Science Advances. Such droughts would be a shock to the food production system.
“If only one country or region sees a drought there is less impact,” Feng said. “But if multiple regions are affected simultaneously, it can affect global production and food prices, and lead to food insecurity.”
For the study, Feng and colleagues analyzed 27 climate models, each of which had three different scenarios. “It was terabytes of information, and it took a couple months and multiple computers to run,” he said. Feng and Miroslav Trnka, a professor at the Global Change Research Institute in the Czech Republic and first author of the study, came up with the idea for the study over pizza at a conference in Nebraska. They sketched out the initial ideas for the study on the back of a napkin.
Read more at University of Arkansas
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
