Feeding the Future: Climate Change and Declining Farm Productivity
By Jeanne Kosciusko-Morizet
Despite significant improvements in agriculture over the past sixty years, a Cornell study reveals that climate change has lowered worldwide farming production by twenty-one percent. Extreme weather and heat damage the global agricultural sector in multiple ways: increases in the number of fires, soil erosion due to stronger winds along with the changes in rainfall patterns, and biodiversity loss.
Allowing scientists to create new species resistant to climatic conditions, the genetic diversity of plants has always been an essential factor to farm productivity. However, because of global warming, a quarter of all wild species are expected to disappear within the next 50 years. With only 150 commonly cultivated plant species left—of which...









