Chapter 2: Methods
2.17 Climate change impact on food security
Climate change, along with other environmental changes, is a growing concern like water availability variation, and its cycle, has increased anxious thoughts claiming the concerns about achieving poor people's food security. In meeting the global demand, which are the results of high population and changes in dietary preferences by the countries, they will have a deleterious effect on native plant exploitation and cropped field intensification (Tilman et al., 2001).
Since food security doesn’t alone means food availability; instead, it is a network that covers sectors like access, utilization, and sustainability, which are address relatively low. To make food security eventually achievable, policy issues relevant to international and sustainable development communities have to take up a broader and comprehensive research framework (Godfray & Garnett, 2014). For this purpose, the global environmental change and food systems (GECAFS) project in 2001 was launched by the international global research community. This interdisciplinary research program aims to 1. better knowledge and understanding about the association between food and the earth systems 2. Provide science-based implements that could study socio-economic and environmental approaches to adapting climatic changes (Ingram & Brklacich, 2006). Formulation of the food system varies concerning the specific range of issues.
It could severely affect the food security of the countries when the factors act in combination. Alteration in distribution, peddling, economical, and choice for particular food items may exhibit modification in the food system organization, which is a consequence of the intensification of agricultural production. These changes have shifted the farmers' economic power to retailers of higher hierarchical bodies, global organizations, and finally multinational corporations. Urbanization and eventual popups of supermarkets in rural countries also contributed to the food system's change (Reardon et al., 2004).
The Word climate change means changes in greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gases can cause unprecedented weather changes such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide methane, etc. The use of fossil fuel combustion in various automobile industries has caused the increase of these atmospheric gases up to 35% and led to the disastrous
pollution and climate change on earth in 2005 (IPCC, 2007). This is a significant source of global climatic change. Even agriculture contributes approximately 10 – 12%
of the world’s greenhouse gas emission source, mainly nitrous oxides and methane (FAO, 2011b), along with 25% of the emission resulted from livestock and forestry (IPCC, 2013; Sadik et al., 2014).
As of 2007, IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) proclaimed direct and indirect human activities were the major reason for the root cause of global climate change (IPCC, 2007). As an outcome, many changes such as an increase in atmospheric temperature, sea-level rise, melting of glaciers have been recorded from human activities, which even threaten the biodiversity. Moreover, the IPCC declared the possible reasons for the natural climatic conditions such as changes in annual precipitation, seasonal events fluctuations and huge demand to easy access of food and decline in agricultural productivity are due to deforestation activities of human (Schmidhuber & Tubiello, 2007). Several studies have found out that climate change is a potential hazard that affects water and food availability (Pinstrup-Andersen &
Rosegrant, 2001; Schmidhuber & Tubiello, 2007; Kang et al., 2009; IPCC, 2013;
Belesky, 2014). Low agricultural productivity is caused by many factors, including an increase in the rate of evapotranspiration and evaporation, drought, and water shortage in natural resources (UNDP, 2006; IPCC, 2007; FAO, 2011a).
Ecologically, intense rainfall plays a detrimental role by devasting floods on the one hand and completely sweeping away the crops on the other hand in some areas (higher-latitude tropics) and reducing the groundwater recharge aquifers. However, IPCC's available data suggested that the demand for the global water resource would be higher. The study identified that snow and glaciers' melting might have a
pronounced effect to cause flooding and river flows in the next two decades (IPCC, 2008). However, this will affect groundwater recharge, which deserves special mention. The IPCC forecasted that groundwater recharge would decline to an estimate of over 70% in semi-arid and arid regions (IPCC, 2008; UN-Water, 2012).
According to the IPCC survey, 2008, a shortage of groundwater resources and rain decrease were predicted in China, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The study stated that it would impact significant crop yields of corn, rice, and wheat, and thereby the production was thought to drop by 20–30% in the next 80 years in China (IPCC, 2008; UN-Water, 2012). The UNDP in 2006 proposed that climate change would trigger water scarcity and food insecurity by 2080 (UNDP, 2006). In 2000, the UN officially enforced 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to be accomplished by 2015, and all the country leaders approved these. The poverty index studies and agriculture and wastewater management studies will throw light on understanding UNDP's first and seventh-millennium development goals. These first and seventh MDGs can be formulating the policies to eliminate poverty and promote environmental sustainability, respectively (Lomazzi et al., 2014; Wichelns, 2015).
The vulnerability of climate change to the world has several consequences. The world has witnessed a negative impact of climate change. MDGs is likely to consider changing climate conditions as it focuses on sustaining agriculture, wastewater management strategy, and fighting against poverty (Kreft et al., 2010).
In 2015, world leaders at the World Government Summit adapted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to build on the MDGs issued 15 years before (World Bank, 2007). The SDGs are focused on poverty and inequality (SDGs 1 and 10), health, education and gender (SDGs 3, 4, and 5), food, water and energy (SDGs 2, 6
and 7), growth, employment and innovation (SDGs 8 and 9), sustainable consumption and human settlements (SDGs 11 and 12), climate, ocean and biodiversity (SDGs 13, 14 and 15), peace and justice (SDG 16) and global partnership to 14 achieve these goals (World Bank, 2007).
Under the UN, there is a global commitment to achieve the SDGs, aligned with adaptation to and mitigation of climate change, including in water-scarce countries, the number of which is forecast to grow with climate change. Climate change has been shown to have a major effect on GCC nations, including the United Arab Emirates.
Studies (Agedi, 2015; Moccae, 2017) have predicted an increase in temperature, storm surges, and sea-level rise in UAE, which will have severe negative impacts on the marine ecosystem and water resources. This will create a risk to the country’s economic, environmental, and social development. Therefore, UAE, which is among the most water-scarce countries globally, shows a strong commitment through its national climate change plan for 2017–2050 and the sustainable environmental Vision 2021 (Moccae, 2017; UAE Government, 2018). These plans' main objectives are managing greenhouse gases, building a green economy, and using innovative solutions for economic diversification and sustainable development.