Climate Change and World Food Security: Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Climate Change and World Food Security", Held in Oxford, U.K., July 11-15, 1993: v. 37 (NATO ASI) - Hardcover

In the last half decade since sustainable development became a serious objective, what have we achieved? Are livelihoods more secure? Are nations wealthier and more resilient? Is environmental quality being restored or maintained? These are essential questions of development. Their answers are many, varied between communities and regions, even between individuals. Two years ago, in the aftermath of the Earth Summit and ratification of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, but before the first Conference of Parties, I participated in a panel at the inaugural Oxford Environment Conference on Climate Change and World Food Security. The panel vigorously reviewed issues of resilient development and food security. This book is a product of the Oxford Environment Conference. It takes the essential questions of sustainability as a starting point to focus on present food security and its future prospects in the face of climate change. Why is this book important? First, I believe our goals to end hunger are under threat. We know what to do in many respects, but fail to generate the finances and political will to change the structures that thrive on poverty. Second, I believe concern about the environment has become dangerously separated from the fundamental issues of human deprivation. Third, I believe climate change is a serious threat and I am dismayed at the way nations dither over how to control greenhouse gas emissions and mechanisms to meet the challenge of adverse climate impacts.

This text addresses the threat climate change poses to world food security. It reviews trends in agriculture and food security and provides projections of the incidence and distribution of hunger over the next few decades; the risk and global impacts of climate change on agricultural systems, relying on alternative models of world agricultural potential that have simulated the impacts of climate change; vulnerability and multiple threats to sustainable agriculture; studies of local impacts and responses; and strategies to limit climate change and improve food security.