In the 20th century, a revolution occurred that was equally impactful as the agricultural revolution that preceded it by some nine thousand years. It was the emergence of modern healthcare and antibiotics that extended lifespans from 30 to 50 to 80 plus years. Today, the world has millions of nonagenarians and thousands of centenarians. Our lifespan is no longer a slave to our biology as technological and scientific advancements provide the means to live lives of more than one hundred years. Some in the medical field believe that our natural lifespan can be extended to 130 in this century. Others talk about immortality as being within reach.

Longevity has been accompanied by global human population growth. There were 1.6 billion humans on Earth at the beginning of the 20th century, 6.1 billion at the beginning of the 21st, and more than 8 billion of us today. Along with the human population has come livestock growth. Chickens, turkeys, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs make up the vast majority of domesticated animals that humans rely on for food. A census of livestock taken in 2014 showed that 21 billion chickens, 462 million turkeys, almost 1.5 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, and 1 billion goats and pigs inhabited the planet. That’s a lot of mouths to feed to help feed us.

By 2050, imagine all those numbers being significantly higher. It is, therefore, no wonder, that food security is of paramount interest for those who govern the planet. Global warming is changing precipitation patterns, causing droughts to go longer and be more severe, producing rainfall events that lead to floods, raising sea levels along coasts where most of humanity lives leading to seawater inundation into freshwater underground aquifers, and more.

Agriculture, therefore not surprisingly, is the sector of the global economy that is most impacted by climate change. The risks to food security from our warming atmosphere cannot be understated when looking at food production in the Global South where population increase is the greatest. This area of the planet contains the warmest countries already. It also contains some of the driest.

Temperatures are rising across the Global South and approaching thresholds where habitability is being challenged and where food crops’ normal growth and maturation are being compromised. Warmer air draws moisture from the soil and leaves, a phenomenon known as evapotranspiration. Warmer air tends to hold more moisture which then increases rainfall intensity which damages growing crops. The race between higher evapotranspiration and higher precipitation in warming climates is being won by the former over the latter.

The cause of the warming, anthropogenic greenhouse gasses includes more carbon dioxide (CO2) which some argue stimulates plant growth and photosynthesis. Hotter temperatures, however, counter the potential of enhanced CO2 growth causing damage to crops as they mature.

Closer to the equator means a lessening in crop tolerance in a changing climate. This is where we are likely to see greater food insecurity and potential famine. Although more temperate mid-latitude countries may gain greater yields from global warming, these are the countries least in danger of food insecurity and the ones experiencing the lowest population growth. This means surplus food produced by these countries needs to offset the food insecurity that may become more common in Global South countries.

But no climate models right now can predict for how long global warming will continue to give the agricultural producers in the Global North greater surpluses to share with areas of the planet that will increasingly feel the devastation of global warming. Because, even in the more temperate latitudes, sizable agricultural losses are bound to occur because of extreme weather events brought on by a destabilized atmosphere.

Is there a rescue plan for global agriculture to address food insecurity?

Several technological and adaptive solutions can mitigate the worst scenarios.

These go beyond the obvious solution to reduce and eliminate anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere and include:

1. Global adoption of genetically modified food crops purposefully designed to grow and produce significant yields in the face of changing climate conditions.
2. Adoption of urban farming including vertical agriculture infrastructure in cities where the growing majority of humanity resides. bringing producers closer to consumers.
3. Widespread carbon fertilization of soils to inhibit increased evapotranspiration on farms in the Global South.
4. Reduction in large livestock farming to reduce carbon emissions.
5. Reforestation and afforestation projects to mitigate atmospheric heat where humans live and food crops are grown.
6. Manage population growth to ensure the agricultural yield capacity of the planet is equal to human global food requirements.
7. Improve distribution infrastructure to ensure food surpluses get to areas where there is inadequate production and high food demand.

The 12th edition of the report issued last week has put the environment at number one “even though the risk will play out over the long term.” That is evident as more and more “green” issues predominate. That the WEF describes the environment as a long-term high risk reflects what science has reported in this 21st century. Not just scientists provide evidence. The largest re-insurers, the companies that underwrite the insurance industry, report record payouts to cover rising extreme weather events. In the United States along the Atlantic seaboard, property owners are seeing the consequences with rising premiums for flood damage. And just this week NOAA and NASA issued their report showing 2014 through 2016 to be the warmest years since modern record keeping on global climate started back in 1880.

The WEF report states that “failure of mitigation and adaptation to climate change” will be the most prominent global risk, and that climate change will be “one of the top three trends to shape global developments over the next 10 years.” They describe the environmental risk as existential, a word we hear a lot these days.

What does existential mean?

Existential originally referred to a philosophy known as existentialism. Those who expounded existentialism were concerned with the nature of the human condition. They came up with their ideas during the late 19th and early 20th century. Existentialists saw the two world wars of the 20th century as the greatest threat to the way of life proposed by the philosophy. The greatest proponents were Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus. But existential has taken on a new meaning in the 21st century. Usually associated with the word threat, such as “the environment poses an existential threat to humanity,” its new means is about existence itself, about our survival as a species, and about the survival of the planet as we know it.

The WEF states that climate change ranks higher in terms of threat than “nuclear weapons or pandemic diseases.” The report talks about the emerging need to manage the “global commons,” another term that has become, of late, a new way of expressing a view of the Earth.

What is the global commons?

As I have written in the past here at Techso Mogro blog, there are no political boundaries visible from space. Earth from space is a totality with land, ocean and atmosphere shared among all who inhabit the planet. These three elements are the global commons. When a nation or industry pollutes the air, when urban wastewater, garbage and farm runoff reaches rivers, lakes and oceans, we impact what we hold in common.

In the infographic displayed below, which appears in the WEF report, environmental categories pose the greatest risk. They appear as green diamonds. Those in red are indirectly related to environmental risk. For example, involuntary migration, water crises, food crises and spread of infectious diseases.

What does involuntary migration have to do with climate change and extreme weather events?

In articles appearing in 2015 in both Time Magazine and Scientific American, the authors described the Syrian civil war as a consequence of climate change. Drought and bad government policies forced more than one million Syrian farm families to abandon their traditional livelihood. They crowded into Syria’s cities. They put stress on already bad urban conditions and corrupt politics. Water shortages, devastated farms, and pervasive corruption sowed the seeds of Syria’s version of the Arab Spring. And Syria didn’t stand alone. Drought and other climate change phenomena impacted much of North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

That’s why the American Pentagon has described climate change as a “threat multiplier.” The WEF Report concurs with this military assessment.