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Impacts: Food insecurity

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Food insecurity

Summary

Climate change is affecting the distribution and spread of food-borne pathogens, resulting in 600 million food-borne illnesses and 420,000 deaths annually. – Awad et al, 2024 (Fig. 1)

Food security: access to sufficient safe and nutritious food for the whole nation, at all times – even in times of crisis. – FAO

According to researchers, Aotearoa New Zealand’s main supermarket chains have only a week’s worth of food supply available at any one time. – Resilience Challenge: Food systems security and disaster recovery

Global agricultural productivity is 20% lower today than what it could have been without climate change. Extreme heat is already harming crop yields… For every 1 degree C of warming, yields of major crops like corn, soybeans and wheat fall by 16% to 20%, gross farm income falls by 7% and net farm income plummets 66%. – Physics.org, 2024
 

Current policy commitments fall short of preventing agriculture from being the source of about one third of global emissions and at the same time a victim of climate… Incentives to promote more sustainable ways of producing food contend with the challenge of addressing stranded assets at the farm level while offering strong and stable livelihoods. Yet this is an opportunity for policymakers to raise the level of ambition. Transforming food systems worldwide provides a uniquely powerful means of addressing the global climate, nature and health emergencies while offering a better life to hundreds of millions of people. – Food Systems Economics Commission, 2024

Persistently higher temperatures, heat waves and ocean warming have reduced livestock and fish stock yield and availability. Besides higher mortality among livestock and fisheries, heat stress has been proven to result in lower egg production and weight. – Fulcrum 22 August 2024

  • The security of food depends on three things: successful harvests, an efficient supply chain to enable us to buy food at a reasonable price, and the safety of that food. But food production has been outsourced at a global scale, requiring interlinked transport and production systems where a single breakdown in one area results in shortages that drive up prices and make food unavailable or inaccessible, and the sustainability of fisheries as been over-stated.
  • Climate change is damaging and destroying basic food crops and devastating marine ecosystems (mahinga kai) and losing our glaciers is going to cause widespread disruptions. War is also interrupting global supply chains.
  • Example 1: Cyclone Gabrielle not only devastated crops that were ready to be picked, but it also destroyed orchards that will take 4 – 8 years to regrow. By then, they may not be viable due to increasingly extreme weather events and higher temperatures.
  • Example 2: Anticipating crop failures in 2022-23, India banned exports of wheat, sugar, and rice, and does not plan to remove the ban in 2024. As 40% of the world’s rice came from India, this led to a massive spike in global prices. This, in turn, drove up the price of rice substitutes: wheat (already in short supply due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine), maize, and soya bean (which is destroying Amazonian rainforests).
  • Example 3: In 2022-2023 drought affected 1.84 billion people; that’s nearly 1 in 4 of all people on Earth. The drought is also affecting global shipping: the Panama Canal is drying up. The alternative route through the Suez Canal is risky due to Israel’s war on Gaza.
“One of the most severe droughts to ever hit the Central American country has stirred chaos in the 80-kilometre route, causing a traffic jam of vessels, casting doubts on the canal’s reliability for international shipping and raising concerns about its affect on global trade.” – AP, Jan. 19, 2024
 

  Impacts

Other sections

Home > Climate wiki > Impacts > Food insecurity

Summary

Climate change is affecting the distribution and spread of food-borne pathogens, resulting in 600 million food-borne illnesses and 420,000 deaths annually. – Awad et al, 2024 (Fig. 1)

Food security: access to sufficient safe and nutritious food for the whole nation, at all times – even in times of crisis. – FAO

According to researchers, Aotearoa New Zealand’s main supermarket chains have only a week’s worth of food supply available at any one time. – Resilience Challenge: Food systems security and disaster recovery

Global agricultural productivity is 20% lower today than what it could have been without climate change. Extreme heat is already harming crop yields… For every 1 degree C of warming, yields of major crops like corn, soybeans and wheat fall by 16% to 20%, gross farm income falls by 7% and net farm income plummets 66%. – Physics.org, 2024
 

Current policy commitments fall short of preventing agriculture from being the source of about one third of global emissions and at the same time a victim of climate… Incentives to promote more sustainable ways of producing food contend with the challenge of addressing stranded assets at the farm level while offering strong and stable livelihoods. Yet this is an opportunity for policymakers to raise the level of ambition. Transforming food systems worldwide provides a uniquely powerful means of addressing the global climate, nature and health emergencies while offering a better life to hundreds of millions of people. – Food Systems Economics Commission, 2024

Persistently higher temperatures, heat waves and ocean warming have reduced livestock and fish stock yield and availability. Besides higher mortality among livestock and fisheries, heat stress has been proven to result in lower egg production and weight. – Fulcrum 22 August 2024

  • The security of food depends on three things: successful harvests, an efficient supply chain to enable us to buy food at a reasonable price, and the safety of that food. But food production has been outsourced at a global scale, requiring interlinked transport and production systems where a single breakdown in one area results in shortages that drive up prices and make food unavailable or inaccessible, and the sustainability of fisheries as been over-stated.
  • Climate change is damaging and destroying basic food crops and devastating marine ecosystems (mahinga kai) and losing our glaciers is going to cause widespread disruptions. War is also interrupting global supply chains.
  • Example 1: Cyclone Gabrielle not only devastated crops that were ready to be picked, but it also destroyed orchards that will take 4 – 8 years to regrow. By then, they may not be viable due to increasingly extreme weather events and higher temperatures.
  • Example 2: Anticipating crop failures in 2022-23, India banned exports of wheat, sugar, and rice, and does not plan to remove the ban in 2024. As 40% of the world’s rice came from India, this led to a massive spike in global prices. This, in turn, drove up the price of rice substitutes: wheat (already in short supply due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine), maize, and soya bean (which is destroying Amazonian rainforests).
  • Example 3: In 2022-2023 drought affected 1.84 billion people; that’s nearly 1 in 4 of all people on Earth. The drought is also affecting global shipping: the Panama Canal is drying up. The alternative route through the Suez Canal is risky due to Israel’s war on Gaza.
“One of the most severe droughts to ever hit the Central American country has stirred chaos in the 80-kilometre route, causing a traffic jam of vessels, casting doubts on the canal’s reliability for international shipping and raising concerns about its affect on global trade.” – AP, Jan. 19, 2024
 
Fig. 1: Foodborne pathogens aggravated by climatic change events. The thickness of the lines is proportional to the number of studies mentioned the relation between climate changes and specific foodborne pathogens Image: Awad et al, 2024 (Click image).
Fig. 1: Foodborne pathogens aggravated by climatic change events. The thickness of the lines is proportional to the number of studies mentioned the relation between climate changes and specific foodborne pathogens Image: Awad et al, 2024 (Click image).

What does this mean for us?

“While many people may not be “hungry” in the sense that they are suffering physical discomfort caused by a severe lack of dietary energy, they may still be food insecure. They might have access to food to meet their energy requirements, yet are uncertain that it will last, or they may be forced to reduce the quality and/or quantity of the food they eat in order to get by. This moderate level of food insecurity can contribute to various forms of malnutrition and can have serious consequences for health and well-being.  – FAO

“Right now, it is estimated about 15-20% of our (Aotearoa) population are impacted by food insecurity. Rates of food insecurity are much higher amongst Māori and Pasifika peoples, and those with disabilities or living in low-income households.” – Evidence presented to the Commerce Commission, August 2021.

Aotearoa produces a vast quality of food—food and fibre made up 81% of our exports ($53.3 billion) in the financial year ending 2022. A recent risk analysis undertaken by Lloyd’s, of the global cascading effects of food insecurity could cost New Zealand around $20 billion/per year over 5 years (Figs. 2 & 3).

“Cyclone Gabrielle took out apple trees and kumara fields, driving up prices. Drought in Argentina caused a nut shortage, pushing up the cost of peanut butter. Torrential rain during planting season decimated India’s rice crop, leading its government to ban some exports and – you guessed it – led to surging global prices.

Shoppers saw these impacts on their supermarket receipts, as food prices increased 8% over the year.

But mortgage holders are hit twice, as the rising cost of food also keeps interest rates high.”  – Olivia Wannan, Stuff, 05 Feb. 2024

While food insecurity is directly linked to poverty, even the wealthiest person can’t buy food if it isn’t available or they can’t access it; for example, roads and bridges washed out by storms may also have destroyed food produce, as occurred as a result of Cyclone Gabrielle (Fig. 5) and the Auckland Anniversary floods, much of which was uninsured (Fig. 4). This adds to the ripple effect across all aspects of our economy.

Fig. 2: Lloyd's Risk analysis for Aotearoa
Fig. 2: Lloyd’s Risk analysis for Aotearoa
Fig. 3: Lloyd's Risk analysis for Aotearoa shows it is the second highest risk profile in the world.
Fig. 3: Lloyd’s Risk analysis for Aotearoa shows it is the second highest risk profile in the world.
Fig. 4: One third of the assets were uninsured, however this doesn't take into account other losses including agricultural losses and lost productivity. Image: New Zealand Institute of Economic Research Public Good Programme
Fig. 4: One third of the assets were uninsured, however this doesn’t take into account other losses including agricultural losses and lost productivity. Image: New Zealand Institute of Economic Research Public Good Programme
Fig. 5: Click image to be read see Carbon Brief''s 'Five charts: How climate change is driving up food prices around the world'
Fig. 5: Click image to be read see Carbon Brief”s ‘Five charts: How climate change is driving up food prices around the world’

Food production

“The South Island’s snow and ice act as a battery that powers our food systems, by storing water to ensure the rivers can keep flowing and the soil stay hydrated year round. So what does it mean when all that frozen water is melting?” – The Spinoff, July 2024

“Repeated food crises over the past two decades have highlighted the fragility of today’s highly interdependent, concentrated global food systems (FAO 2022). Paradoxically, this fragility arises from the pursuit of efficiency. Short-term optimization of resources has tended to concentrate a large proportion of global production of many traded food commodities in locations with the most favorable cost/output ratios. This makes global supply of those commodities much more vulnerable to shocks in those locations than would be the case if there were less specialization and more redundancy in food systems, that is, if traded commodities were grown in more locations more widely dispersed around the globe.  – Food Systems Economics, 2024 

Fig. 6: Cyclone Gabrielle damaged crops, land, and food growing infrastructure; image Leonie Clough
Fig. 6: Cyclone Gabrielle damaged crops, land, and food growing infrastructure; image Leonie Clough
 To understand the looming ‘food production’ problem, it helps to understand how we reached this point.
 
For the last 10,000 years or so, the seasons changed in predictable patterns. This enabled the development and expansion of agriculture, which underpinned the growth of civilizations. This ultimately led to the the Industrial Revolution, which in turn industrialised agriculture. The life-supporting ecosystem services of natural environments were burned and bulldozed to make way for monoculture crops that could only thrive with the support of toxic herbicides and pesticides. Industrial-scale irrigation systems steals water stolen from once-healthy rivers and groundwater, and poisons what remains with the runoff. Perversely, burning fossil fuels powered this Revolution, changing the climate so that the reliable weather patterns that agriculture depends upon are now a thing of the past.
 
Today, the primary threat to food security is hubris: the dominant ‘business as usual’ attitude that industrial farming practices across Aotearoa need only make a few tweaks to survive increasingly extreme weather. The fear that new diseases and pest species migrating from warmer climes is assuaged by the hope that they might be controlled by even more chemicals. Yet the onslaught of extreme weather, pests and diseases will increase as the climate becomes increasingly erratic.
 
The issue is not limited to the land. In the ocean, marine heatwaves are now the norm, acidification is increasing, and oxygen is declining, all of which are resulting in ecosystem collapse. Large parts of the ocean are now dead zones. Farmed as well as wild-caught seafood is already being impacted, and the situation is deteriorating.
 

“Changing climatic conditions, including warming, also progressively shift plants and animals to higher latitudes, higher elevations or deeper ocean waters…. In the ocean, marine plants and animals including entire communities have shifted their distributions poleward at an average speed of 59km per decade due to increasing water temperatures. Ocean acidification and decreasing oxygen in the water also play a part. Together all three processes have caused a reorganisation of biodiversity over the past 50 years, especially at the ocean surface.” – IPCC AR6 WGII

Supply chain

The more intricate the supply chain between food growers and consumers, the more vulnerable it is, something clearly identified in the Lloyds report. Taking a very simple example here in Aotearoa, most processed foods, from biscuits and bread to tomato sauce and jam, contain sugar. But sugar is not grown in Aotearoa, so along with many other raw and processed foods, it must be imported, which, being non-perishable, is done by ship.

“There are certain key foods consumed in large quantities that cannot be grown in New Zealand, or for which we do not produce enough to meet domestic needs. These at-risk commodities include sugar, wheat, maize, rice, and coffee, which are staples in the New Zealand diet or for livestock production and are not easily substitutable. Furthermore, these foods are imported from only a small number of places, so any disruption in trade flows or production in those countries will severely affect New Zealand’s food security.”  – Food Systems Economics, 2024 

Many of the world’s most important ports may be inoperable by 2050 due to even a modest rise in sea levels. Coastal inundation affects port operations even in non-coastal regions connected through land transport networks.
 
Here in Aoteaora, even the transport between the North and South Islands is under threat, with both Wellington and Picton ports vulnerable to rising sea levels and aging infrastructure. Yet the coalition National-led Government is crippling the Cook Straight ferry service by refusing to acknowledge this vulnerability, setting up this vital link to catastrophic failure. This is particularly egregious as each island could provide food to the other when, not if, the next major climate event affects food crops. The result will be increased transport costs via other methods such as coastal shipping or flights.
Fig. 7: Rod Emmerson’s cartoon 25 January 2024, New Zealand Herald.
Fig. 7: Rod Emmerson’s cartoon 25 January 2024, New Zealand Herald.

Roading infrastructure is also at risk. For example, the Canterbury Climate Change Risk Assessment (V5.0) report calculated that 144km of roads within Ōtautahi/Christchurch City alone are currently exposed to surface flooding at 1% AEP, that is, a 1-in-100 year storm event, which are becoming more frequent. Moreover, this assessment was made prior to a 2023 GNS report, which found areas of Ōtautahi/Christchurch dropping (relative to the ocean) much faster than originally presumed. In some locations, the effects of rising sea levels will be felt as much as 80 years sooner than previously projected. That is, they are now at immediate risk.

Repairing roads and bridges will ultimately become unaffordable (especially given the economic woes already faced by Christchurch City Council). This will likely result in some communities, particularly around Banks Peninsula where road access is already limited, becoming permanently isolated unless alternative transport routes (roads, ferries) are funded, developed, and maintained under the pressure of increasing weather extremes. 

More information

 
  • Projected weather changes to Canterbury

    “In media articles about unprecedented flooding, you’ll often come across the statement that for every 1°C of warming, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture. This figure comes from research undertaken by the French engineer Sadi Carnot and published 200 years ago this year. We now know there’s more to the story. Yes, a hotter atmosphere has the capacity to hold more moisture. But the condensation of water vapour to make rain droplets releases heat. This, in turn, can fuel stronger convection in thunderstorms, which can then dump substantially more rain. This means that the intensity of extreme rainfall could increase by much more than 7% per degree of warming. What we’re seeing is that thunderstorms can likely dump about double or triple that rate – around 14–21% more rain for each degree of warming.” – Dowdy et al, May 2024

    Fewer frosts, higher winds, damaging storms, and more extreme droughts will make growing food and restoring native ecosystems more challenging. Infrastructure and private property are at increasing risk as these and other built structures were erected to withstand a climate that no longer exists. 
     

    The following climate change projections for the Canterbury Region from NIWA are based on data from the 2013 IPCC modelling; that is, it’s more than 10-years old. Some unprecedented extremes in the following graphs already are occurring. Over time, these will become more common, ultimately becoming the norm before they, too, are overtaken by more extreme events.

    “The chances of getting a warm year are increasing all the time. The chances of getting a cold year are decreasing all the time. When you look at shorter time frames, from day to months, it’s really about the chances of getting a very hot event, extreme high temperatures, or heavy rainfall, are what’s really impacting both ecosystems and human activities. It’s how extreme are changing that’s really important.

    As temperatures rise, the number of rain days decrease. So moderate rain decreases while extreme rain increases. The situation is not as clear cut as this in Canterbury due to a number of variables, but the trend is the same: more and more extreme rainfall events and floods, with concurrent impacts, including erosion and landslips.” –     Prof. James Renwick, O Tātou Ngāhere Conference: Regenerating our landscape with native forest, 2022

    The extreme rainfall at Hawkes Bay in January 2023 offers some insight into this. For example, Models for extreme high rainfall events in the 2020 NIWA report, Climate change projections and impacts for Tairāwhiti and Hawke’s Bay, predicted that under the RCP8.5 scenario, the average maximum annual 5-day rainfall by 2081, would be 151.3 (+14.8)mm at Glengarry (p129). During Cyclone Gabrielle (2023), the Glengarry site recorded 546mm of rainfall, with almost 400mm falling in 12 hours.

Projected changes to temperarure

Fig. 6: Projected annual mean temperature changes under an RCP8.5 climate change scenario. Time periods: 2031- 2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average, based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA's Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)
Fig. 6: Projected annual mean temperature changes under an RCP8.5 climate change scenario. Time periods: 2031- 2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average, based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA’s Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)

Projected changes to rainfall

Fig. 7: Projected annual mean rainfall changes under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA's Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)
Fig. 7: Projected annual mean rainfall changes under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA’s Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)

Projected changes in the number of dry days

Fig. 8: Projected annual mean number of dry days under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average  based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA's Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)
Fig. 8: Projected annual mean number of dry days under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average  based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA’s Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)

Projected changes in the number of snow days

Fig. 9: Projected mean number of snow days under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average  based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA's Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)
Fig. 9: Projected mean number of snow days under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average  based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA’s Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)

Projected evapotranspiration deficit accumulation

Fig.10: Projected annual potential evapotranspiration deficit (PED) accumulation changes under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average and should be added to those baseline figures to get the final projected figure. The figures in this and all graphs are based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA's Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)
Fig.10: Projected annual potential evapotranspiration deficit (PED) accumulation changes under RCP8.5 climate change scenarios. Time periods: 2031-2050 (left) and 2081-2100 (right). Changes are relative to 1986-2005 average and should be added to those baseline figures to get the final projected figure. The figures in this and all graphs are based on the average of six global climate models. Results are based on dynamical downscaled projections using NIWA’s Regional Climate Model. Resolution of projection is 5km x 5km. (Image: NIWA)