Climate Change and the Global Food System
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Changes in the climate obviously have an impact on agricultural production. The scale of that impact will vary, and for some farmers it could leave them with no choice but to change crops or change locations. Sarah Nolet of Tenacious Ventures says things like crop failures because of climate change can have a domino effect on the global food supply.
Nolet…”Especially in areas where there's a particular dependence on like a food crop, you know, rice in Southeast Asia or cassava in Africa, like things like that. If there's a crop failure, there will be migration. Like people will try to move to find food, especially depending on the political climate and aid and those kinds of things. But even on a macro or micro level, people will move. And so then does that impact other commodities? Imagine there's a crop failure of rice in Southeast Asia, but then as those people move, there's no one doing the shrimp farming because the population that was eating the rice moves. And so then, so then if there's a, you know, like shrimp isn't being farmed. Well, what are like protein substitutes and what markets are, you know, producing chicken or whatever else that are shrimp elsewhere in the world. And so I think those kind of like, because ag is so globalized and climate will have local impacts, but those have global impacts. Like it was sort of thinking through some of those second and third-order consequences where we thought researchers, especially where somewhere like Australia is super export-oriented. Well, who are those markets and what are the dynamics of those populations? Like that's the kind of stuff in a black swan context you might want to be thinking about.”
That’s co-founder of Tenacious Ventures, Sarah Nolet.
