“We can include policies to assure food security in climate mitigation, this is the good news,” says Alexander Popp from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, co-author of the study. For instance, redistribution of the tax income to poor households can help, as well as improved agricultural practices and technology transfer from rich to poor countries. “Yet there’s also bad news,” adds Popp. “We must include these policies to assure food security, because if we focused only on climate change mitigation and nothing else, we might indeed contribute to hunger.”
“While we found a similar effect in an earlier paper, this time we applied multiple alternative models and showed that the results are robust and a very high confidence,” says Shinichiro Fujimoi from Kyoto University, lead-author of the study and a guest researcher in the IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) Energy Program. “Policy makers should be aware that potential issues could arise as a result of the uniqueness of the food system compared to, for example, the energy system.”
Both climate stabilization and zero hunger are part of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Many of them interact, sometimes with substantial trade-offs. “For instance, biomass plantations of trees and grasses can be one way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, because plants store it in their leaves and trunks,” explains Benjamin Bodirsky from PIK, a co-author of the study. “But these plantations can create a fight for land between bioenergy, food production and nature conservation. It is therefore crucial to first lift people out of poverty and to do all we can to reduce emissions, before we eventually use the last-resort of carbon removal through bioenergy."
Article: Shinichiro Fujimori, Tomoko Hasegawa, Volker Krey, Keywan Riahi, Christoph Bertram, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Valentina Bosetti, Jessica Callen, Jacques Després, Jonathan Doelman, Laurent Drouet, Johannes Emmerling, Stefan Frank, Oliver Fricko, Petr Havlik, Florian Humpenöder, Jason F. L. Koopman, Hans van Meijl, Yuki Ochi, Alexander Popp, Andreas Schmitz, Kiyoshi Takahashi, Detlef van Vuuren (2019): A multi-model assessment of food security implications of climate change mitigation. Nature Sustainability ]DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0286-2]
Weblink to the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0286-2
