A press release from Kansas State University: A recent study involving Kansas State University researchers finds that in the coming decades at least one-quarter of the world's wheat traded will be lost to extreme weather from climate change if no adaptive measures are taken.Vara Prasad, professor of crop ecophysiology and director of the USAID Feed the Future Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab at Kansas State University, is part of a collaborative team that found wheat yields are projected to decrease by 6 percent for each degree Celsius the temperature rises if no measures to adapt to extreme weather fluctuations are taken.
Based on the 2012-2013 wheat harvest of 701 million tons worldwide, the resulting temperature increase would result in 42 million tons less produced wheat per degree of temperature increase. To put this in perspective, the amount is equal to a quarter of the global wheat trade, which reached 147 million tons in 2013. Changes in genetics and crop management can minimize some of these losses.
"It's pretty severe," Prasad said. "The projected effect of climate change on wheat is more than what has been forecast. That's challenging because the world will have to at least double our food supply in the next 30 years if we're going to feed 9.6 billion people."
Prasad is a co-author on the study, "Rising temperatures reduce global wheat production," published in a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
..."Extreme temperature doesn't only mean heat; it also means cold," Prasad said. "Simply looking at the average temperature doesn't really show us anything because it's the extremities that are more detrimental to crops. Plants can handle gradual changes because they have time to adapt, but an extreme heat wave or cold snap can kill a plant because that adjustment period is often nonexistent."....
Wheat, shot by Scott Bontz (Dehaan), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
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