SEATTLE, Washington, January 14, 2009 (ENS) - Climate change will desiccate crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century, leaving half the world's population facing a food crisis unless methods of adaptation are found quickly, new research shows.
The area at risk stretches from the southern United States to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from northern India and southern China to southern Australia and all of Africa. Currently three billion people live in the tropics and subtropics, and their number is expected to nearly double by the end of the century. Many people who now live in these areas subsist on less than $2 a day and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods.
"The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn't take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures," said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor and lead author of the study in the current edition of the journal "Science." "You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it," he said. "You also could mitigate it and not let it happen in the first place, but we're not doing a very good job of that."
Battisti collaborated with Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment, to examine the impact of climate change on the world's food security. The National Science Foundation and the Tamaki Foundation funded their research.
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