Page 14 - FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change

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Theme 1.
Climate impacts on land use, food and agriculture, and related ecosystems
CROSS-CUTTING MESSAGES
• Expanding knowledge and improving understanding of extreme climatic events and their implications across sectors, regions and time would help strengthen resilience and reduce the risk from cascading events across society.
• Single-issue solutions hold a high potential for unintended consequences and are unlikely to address the complex effects of climate change. We need to think of interrelated systems and inter-disciplinary approaches to tackle climate, land, ecosystem and food linkages, interactions and feedbacks.
• For climate action (adaptation, mitigation), we need to devise integrated frameworks and approaches that ensure scientific and technical solutions are co-designed with socio-economic and institutional assessments to enable the desired change.
• To achieve food and nutrition security, a food systems approach is required stretching over the whole food chain (production through consumption), all food security dimensions (availability, access, utilization and stability) and placed within a larger economy and broader ecosystem function (land, water, and energy).
• In developing regions, especially where food insecurity is high, climate policies and investments must target poor and food insecure people for adaptation and resiliency-building strategies.
• To secure a resilient food system under climate change requires a range of appropriate sustainability metrics to better support integrated and multidisciplinary scenario analyses combining socio-economic and ecological dimensions.
• Transforming the food system to address the twin challenge of climate change and food security requires an approach that addresses food production, distribution and demand and seeks to utilize and expand on existing synergies and co-benefits to manage interactions across temporal and spatial scales. This will also require governance and institutions to adopt such integrated perspectives, informed by robust assessments of the scientific evidence that allow institutions to navigate this complex space.
KEY MESSAGES
Climate change is expected to impact on crop production, livestock production, fisheries and aquaculture. There is robust evidence of negative impacts from heat and water stresses on crop yields but much less evidence is available for livestock feed, livestock production, fisheries and aquaculture.
There is ample literature focusing on the effects of climate change on freshwater resources but there remain many uncertainties to be addressed, in particular the role of extreme and elevated CO2 effects on terrestrial ecosystems and the resulting feedback processes to the global water cycle.
Information on the effects of climate change on current and projected groundwater resources is limited and needs further research.
We need to address in detail the impact of sea level rise and related climatic changes (costal currents, temperature, salinity, nutrients) on coastal water quality and coastal agriculture.
There is a wide range of studies looking into climate impacts on soils but most overlook linkages to agriculture and food security, partly due to the very disparate data available. This gap is being addressed thanks to new developments in global soils data.
FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change, land use and food security