Climate change and its growing threat to hunger

The number of floods around the world are increasing at a record pace. This further complicates the challenge of feeding the world when food crops wash away over and over again. That is why experts say that the biggest threat of climate change is to food.

From Reuters Alert Net writer Amantha Perera attended the World Conservation Congress in South Korea that touched on this issue.

Achim Steiner, executive director of  the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warned that shifts in weather patterns suggest that problems for people and the environment will multiply if no action is taken on climate change.

 “I think climate change has resonated at every level of discussion both here and at Rio,” Steiner told AlertNet, referring to the Rio+20 sustainable development conference in June. He warned that if action is not taken to limit harm to nature, a large part of the global population will bear the consequences.

“We are living in an age of destruction. If we believe that we can feed nine billion people with the agriculture and industrial model of the past century, we are wrong,” Steiner said.

Similar views were expressed by other experts that changing climate patterns were raising risks and pushing companies as well as governments to act.

“Climate change is worsening everything. Flood disasters increased by 230 percent and drought disasters by 38 percent in the 20 years to the early 2000s,” Rachel Kyte, vice president of sustainable development at the World Bank said in her keynote address on the opening day of the congress.

Ajanta Dey, an experts on mangroves from the Indian state of Kolkata told AlertNet that climate change-linked sea level rise and changing rainfall patterns were putting many communities living along the mouth of the Ganges River at risk.

“The monsoon rainfalls have changed drastically. All of it is being blamed on changing climate patterns and I feel the world needs to open its eyes,” she told AlertNet.