Introduction - Climate Resilient Agriculture for Ensuring Food Security - page 10

enhanced climate risk management support to
agriculture and farming households are critical to
counter the impacts of climate change.
At the same time, our climate is being infl u-
enced by GHG emissions from agriculture, which
is responsible for an estimated 10-12 % of total
GHG emissions or as much as 30 % when con-
sidering land-use change, including deforestation
driven by agricultural expansion for food, fi ber,
and fuel. The sector is responsible for 47 % of the
world's methane (CH 4 ) and 58 % of its nitrous
oxide (N 2 O) emissions. Methane contributes 3.3
gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide equivalent
(CO 2 e) per year, primarily from enteric fermenta-
tion in livestock, and nitrous oxide contributes
2.8 Gt CO 2 e per year, mainly as emissions from
soils as a result of application of nitrogen fertil-
izers and as nitrogen excreted in livestock feces
and urine. Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) accounts for
only a small proportion of agricultural emissions.
Agricultural soils both emit and absorb large
fl uxes of carbon dioxide, resulting in a small net
emission of 40 megatons (Mt) CO 2 e, less than
1 % of global anthropogenic CO 2 emissions.

The IPCC predicts that during the next
decades, billions of people, particularly those in
developing countries, will face changes in rainfall
patterns that will contribute to severe water short-
ages or fl ooding, and rising temperatures that will
cause shifts in crop growing seasons. This will
increase food shortages and distribution of dis-
ease vectors, putting populations at greater health
and life risks. The predicted temperature rise of
1-2.5 °C by 2030 will have serious effects,
including reduced crop yield in tropical areas.
The impact of a single climate-, water-, or
weather-related disaster can wipe out years of
gains in economic development.
Climate change will result in additional food
insecurities, particularly for the resource poor in
developing countries who cannot meet their food
requirements through market access.
Communities must protect themselves against
the possibility of food-shortage emergencies
through appropriate use of resources in order to
preserve livelihoods as well as lives and property.
It is imperative to identify and institutionalize
mechanisms that enable the most vulnerable to
cope with climate change impacts. This requires
collaborative thinking and responses to the issues
generated by the interaction of food security, cli-
mate change, and sustainable development.
Agriculture and food systems must improve
and ensure food security, and to do so, they need
to adapt to climate change and natural resource
pressures and contribute to mitigating climate
change. These challenges, being interconnected,
have to be addressed simultaneously.

1.4 Food Security and Climate

Change

Many countries worldwide are facing food crises
due to confl ict and disasters, while food security is
being adversely affected by unprecedented price
hikes for basic food, driven by historically low
food stocks, high oil prices and growing demand
for agrofuels, and droughts and fl oods linked to
climate change. High international cereal prices
have already sparked food riots in several coun-
tries. In addition, rural people (who feed the cities)
are now, for the fi rst time, less numerous than city
dwellers and developing countries are becoming
major emitters of greenhouse gases.
Many traditional equilibria are changing, such
as those between food crops and energy crops
and cultivated lands and rangelands, as is the
nature of confl icts in general. These changing
equilibria are, and will be, affected by changing
climate, resulting in changed and additional
vulnerability patterns.

1.4.1 Food Security

One of the fi rst planetary boundaries, perhaps the
most important one, is that the world needs to
feed itself. But today, almost one billion people
are hungry. Another billion is malnourished,
lacking essential micronutrients. While, globally,
enough food is being produced to feed the entire
world, one-third of it is lost or wasted, and low
incomes and problems of distribution mean that
accessibility to food is still out of reach for one
out of six people on our planet. By 2050, food