Climate Change Will Reduce Food Sources, UN Report Says

The way to convince the public that climate change is real and will affect them could be through their stomachs.

Researchers and activists who are campaigning to stop global warming may focus on food as a way to connect with people, The Guardian reported.

According to a new study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "All aspects of food security are potentially affected by climate change."

As the Earth warms, crop yields will be diminished as the risk of flooding rises, said the report. Researchers believe that crops could be negatively affected by climate change as soon as the 2030s.

When advocating for sustainability, campaigners should focus on food as an immediate concern that people will relate to, Rachel Kyte, the World Bank vice-president for climate change, told The Guardian in an interview before the IPCC report's release.

"The public connects with these issues through food better than through any other issue in a way that we haven't been able to mobilize people by just telling them to drive a hybrid or switch the light off," she said.

"There is a way to talk about what you eat that will bring a conversation around climate change."

Food will connect people from every class, Kyte noted.

"You want to be able to sustain your children," she told The Guardian. "It's a concern whether you are rich or poor. I don't think we have put a huge focus on food and it's time we did."

According to the IPCC report, which was recently presented to the United Nations, crop yields could fall by 2 percent each decade by 2030 even as the population grows by 2 percent every year.

The report has received some criticism, most notably from researcher Richard Tol, an economist at the University of Sussex who said the draft of the report exaggerated the effects of climate change.

Tol, who had been heading the report's chapter on economics, asked to have his name removed from the summary.

"The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together," he told BBC News.

"This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity."