PNAS Study: Hotter Earth Could Cut Vegetable Yields By 35%, Legume Yields By 9%
LONDON, 19 June, 2018 – A hotter world could also be a hungrier one, with shrinking harvests and poorer quality plants. As planetary temperatures rise in response to ever more profligate combustion of fossil fuels, climate change could lower the yield of vegetable and legume crops – and at the same time reduce their nutritional content.
And the same high end-of-the-century temperatures could raise the risk of massive, near-global losses for the world’s most widely grown cereal, maize. This double blow comes close upon the evidence – from field trials over many years – that another global staple, rice, is likely to become less rich in protein and vitamins as temperatures increase.
British researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they studied 174 research papers based on 1,540 experiments in 40 countries between 1975 and 2016, on the probable effect of changes in water supplies, ozone, atmospheric carbon dioxide and ambient temperatures, on vegetables and legumes.
They found that on the basis of changes predicted for later this century, average yields of vegetables could fall by 35%, and legumes by 9%. There has been evidence that more atmospheric carbon dioxide could fertilise more plant growth, but other accompanying changes – greater extremes of heat, drought, flood and so on – could cancel out any such gains.
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