Climate Change to Force Deadly Diet Shift in Africa
Climate change will severely impact global food production, causing an estimated 529,000 deaths by 2050 from resulting diet shifts compared with a future without higher carbon emissions, a study says.
Changes in temperature and precipitation "are expected to reduce global crop productivity" and drive people to eat less red meat and less water-intensive fruit and vegetables, says the study published yesterday in The Lancet. This would counteract ongoing efforts to improve nutrition among the world's poorest people.
"Climate change takes away around 30 per cent of the progress [in nutrition improvement] that you would otherwise expect" if we limited carbon emissions to curb global warming, says Marco Springmann, the study's lead author.
Courtney Brooks