Hindering Harvests; Climate Change and Crops  

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Jenis: Article from Bulletin/Magazine
Dalam koleksi: The Economist (http://search.proquest.com/) vol. 399 no. 8732 (May 2011), page 73-74.
Topik: Climate Change; Research; Crops; Output; Agricultural Production; International; Global Warming

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: EE29.66 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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Researchers have now compiled an estimate of global changes in crop yields which can be put down to recent increases in temperature and decreases in rainfall (the world as a whole is getting wetter, but the rain has stayed away from some agricultural plains). The bad news is that they find that climate change has lowered the amount of maize (or corn, if you prefer) and wheat produced in a given area. The good news is that the effect is so far reasonably small. David Lobell and Justin Costa-Roberts, of Stanford University, and Wolfram Schlenker, of Columbia University, first put together temperature and precipitation figures for the parts of the world where four staple crops--wheat, maize, rice and soya--are grown. It turns out that during the seasons in which crops grow, these arable areas had on average become significantly warmer in the 29 years after 1979. The researchers then assembled models of how the yields changed from year to year, and against the longer trend, to find changes linked to temperature and rainfall that are independent of improvements through better farming. Finally they compared today's yields with what their models say yields would have been with today's farming but in the 1980's climate. Some people will be surprised, even dismayed, that comparatively modest climate changes are already doing measurable damage. But in context, it is quite small.

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