Climate change may hurt food supplies, cause extra deaths: study

PanARMENIAN.Net - The effects of climate change on food production could cause 500,000 extra deaths by 2050 compared to a world without global warming, according to a study released Thursday, March 3, AFP reports.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue at current rates, this would cut projected increases in food availability by about a third before mid-century, the study found.

As of 2015, some 800 million people in the world are undernourished, meaning they cannot meet daily minimum dietary energy requirements, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has said.

With the global population set to increase from seven to nine billion by 2050, food production will have to expand even more rapidly if all the world's people are to have enough to eat.

But global warming -- on track to boost temperatures three degrees Celsius by 2100, compared to pre-Industrial-Era levels -- is threatening to make that difficult or impossible, experts warn.

"Climate change effects are expected to reduce the quantity of food harvested, which could lead to higher food prices and reduced consumption," according the study, published in the medical journal The Lancet.

The proportion of fruits and vegetables in diets, for example, will almost certainly decline in a climate-change-addled world, he said, according to AFP.

Low- and middle-income countries will probably be hit hardest, with almost three-quarters of all climate-related deaths expected to occur in China and India under a so-called "business and usual" climate scenario.

Even if the world's nations succeed in holding the rise in global temperature to 2C, there would still be an additional 150,000 climate-related deaths due to changes in diet and calorie intake, the researchers found.