Photos The Sahel
Dealing with the problem could be cheap in some places, where farmers can plant earlier or later in the growing season. But the best solutions, said Lobell, require investment in technologies to pipe in more water and turn fallow land fertile. Aid agencies, said Lobell, need advance warnings of potential hunger situations. To make this happen, the United States Agency for International Development has created a discipline-crossing program called FEWS NET (for Famine Early Warning System Network). "Climate change is an opportunity to do the work we should have been doing all along, helping farmers to increase their agricultural productivity," said FEWS NET researcher Molly Brown, of the Biospheric Sciences Branch at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. In a paper accompanying Lobell's study in Science, Brown and co-author Chris Funk of the University of California, Santa Barbara, call for more attention to predictions like Lobell's. "A changing climate will force the political and economic systems to change so that people can continue to live and work in semi-arid regions. We see it as an opportunity to improve the food security of the poorest and most vulnerable," Brown told Discovery News. "The Lobell study highlights some very significant red flags in terms of global food production," said Funk, adding that his own work suggests an even "more pessimistic precipitation outlook" than Lobell's. "On the other hand, I firmly believe that effective responses to these issues are possible," he said. "What will be needed, however, is real political commitment to change, both by the international community and by individual countries in the developing world." Related Links: |
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