Climate Change: Implications for Agriculture

Authors

• BSR Staff

  

The report is one in a 13-part series that translates the IPCC assessments for business leaders and also part of BSR's Business in a Climate-Constrained World initiative.

Findings include:

• Climate-related impacts are already reducing crop yields in some parts of the world, a trend that is projected to continue as temperatures rise.
• Farmers can adapt to some changes, but there is a limit to what can be managed. The agricultural industry's own interests are best served by ambitious approaches to adaptation and to cutting emissions.
• Greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from agriculture comprised about 10 to 12 percent of manmade GHG emissions in 2010.
• Opportunities for mitigation include reducing emissions from land-use change, land management, and livestock management.
• The potential for reducing GHG emissions through changes in consumption could be substantially higher than technical mitigation options.

The report also notes specific ways climate change will affect the agriculture industry—including on food security, crop yields, developing countries, water security, price volatility, food quality, pests and disease, livestock, labor, and the supply chain—and it offers supply- and demand-side opportunities for managing risk and building resilience to climate change.

A Spanish-language translation is available for download here.