Commonwealth Food Futures 2022, Birmingham, UK. 28 July 2022
The Food Foundation
We're a charity presenting solutions to achieve a sustainable food system which delivers health and wellbeing for all.
By Alan Dangour
July 2022 has brought temperatures of 40 degrees plus in the UK, giving us the hottest day ever recorded accompanied by an alarming longer-term drought. Around the world the climate change picture is similar – astonishing heat in India and Pakistan; floods in Australia and South Africa, drought in Northern Italy; wildfires in Europe and North America – the list goes on.
This climate crisis is triggering a parallel health crisis with people struggling to survive extreme heat, but also a new pattern of infectious diseases, impact on crops and food supply, livelihoods, migration, societal breakdown and conflict in the competition for increasingly scarce resources.
The world is currently 1.1 degrees Centigrade hotter than pre-industrial levels. Despite ambitions to keep global heating to below 1.5 degrees in line with the Paris climate agreement of 2015, we are now on a path to 2.7 degrees global heating, described by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres as “code red for humanity”, and a threat to our survival.
The Food Foundation’s Food Futures conference has highlighted the need for better food systems to support cities and reduce the environmental footprint of food consumption in major conurbations. We know from global crop modelling studies that we face alarming reduction of 10-15% in the yield of major cereal crops under median predicted climate change scenarios.
The evidence of impact on yields of fruit and vegetables is less certain, but the data that are available suggest that hotter and drier conditions with increased salinity and ozone levels mean all food plants will grow less well. These impacts are not uniform – some parts of the world – much of Africa, South Asia, South America, Australia/South Pacific will feel them most severely.
Supplies of nutritious food to cities with large populations are therefore highly vulnerable.?We have already seen how drought in Spain and Mexico in recent years have limited supplies to the UK of lettuce and avocados. These examples may seem trivial but they are harbingers of what a heating planet means, putting huge strain on global food systems, pushing up prices and making healthy diets even less affordable.
It is clear that climate change is now proceeding faster than we previously thought but who is ready??Cities must urgently think about how to maintain food and nutrition security in the face of the changing climate. We have already seen what happens when we’re not ready. The 2008/9 spike in food prices pushed the number of people defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation as undernourished to nearly one billion and there were food riots in more than 30 cities around the world.
At the Wellcome Trust, an independent global health philanthropic foundation based in the UK, we recognise climate change as a major global health challenge.?Our mission in the Climate and Health team is to galvanise global support for research and advocacy to put health at the heart of climate change action.?
We will seek to support at scale, the research that is needed on the sustainability and resilience of food systems with cities as one of our focus areas.?We seek to generate evidence, co-created with local policy stakeholders, that can be used to drive the urgent action that is needed.?
Our ambition is to help to build a movement within cities across the globe to recognise and address these critical issues – public sector policies, private sector actions, plans and innovations for local communities to help themselves and protect the most vulnerable.
These are huge challenges. I’m concerned that there are currently very few solutions. Much of the necessary research still needs to be done, and then of course there has to be the political will to implement the findings of the research.
We are hoping that raised awareness that the climate crisis is a health crisis will foster a groundswell of support and a sense of common purpose for our work and the work of our partners already working in the world’s cities. ?There is no time to lose in bringing together more evidence, ideas and initiatives in the drive to make faster progress.