20150814_WS

Source: BBC World Service, Newsday

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02zlx47

Date: 14/08/2015

Event: Matt McGrath discusses forecast for more "extreme food shocks"

Credit: BBC World Service, Newsday

People:

Nkem Ifejika: BBC reporter and presenter
Kirsty Lewis: Principal Climate Change Consultant, Met Office
Matt McGrath: BBC environment correspondent

Nkem Ifejika: Now, let's talk food security, where the question to ask is whether changes to the climate are making it more likely that the world could suffer what are known as "extreme food shocks", sudden crop failures that lead to rapid price rises. Researchers in the US and here in the UK think so, and by the end of this century such events could happen in 7 out of 10 years. Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath told me how they'd come to this conclusion.

Matt McGrath: Researchers are well aware, if you like, that feeding the world is a growing problem - it's getting tougher. The UN says we'll need 60% more food by 2050. Now these scientists set out to see what the impact of climate change might be on those calculations, on extreme weather events that might hit the four main crops that the world uses - that's rice, maize, wheat and soybeans - and especially in the critical growing areas, that's the US, India and China. They found that the type of disruptive weather event that happens once every 100 years, at the moment, will be happening once every 30 years by 2040 and later in the century, as you say, it could be happening much more often, in 7 out of 10 years. Now, Kirsty Lewis from the UK Met Office told me that these were estimations and it was very hard to predict accurately, but the underlying signal was strong.

Kirsty Lewis: What happens is not just the shift in average climate - we're quite used to the idea of average temperature increasing - it is really about how variable that climate is and how more frequent these extreme events are. And they're the hardest ones, really, as climate scientists, for us to model, so it makes it very difficult for us to put the figures on exactly how frequently, but the signal is very clear that these events become more frequent in the future, and the worst cases being worse than they are in the present day.

Nkem Ifejika: What exactly does she mean by "these events"? I mean, give me some specifics.

Matt McGrath: Well, you know, what she's talking about really is that we're all aware that, you know, weather events, or that the global temperatures are going up, but what's hidden in that are what they call variability, and that means, you know, what you're predicting for 2 or 3 years, that's 2 to 3 summers in a row you might have great weather and growing conditions, and then you have massive drought that kills all the crops, or indeed you have massive floods that kill all the crops. And these become more difficult to predict, and therefore more difficult to build into people's calculations. So, it's the variability, it's the likelihood of having extreme droughts or extreme floods, kind of weird weather that people talk about, it's those type of things happening in places at critical times, when people are growing big crops.

Nkem Ifejika: When you say "variability", I guess you mean, you know, the kinds of events which could happen, but you probably mean the locations as well.

Matt McGrath: Yeah, they looked in this study, really, at these four main areas, or these three main areas, actually, the US, China and India. And they produce so much of the world's food. And, you know, the world depends on these areas, as bread-baskets, if you like, quite literally in some respects. So, you know, disruptive events there - we saw in 2010 in Russia there was a massive, massive drought that killed most of the grain harvest. And you know, the following year in the spring, the following year in North Africa, one of the world's biggest importers of grain, people were protesting in the streets about the price of bread - they were protesting with baguettes, showing that the price of bread was gone up too much. And from that, many people say, the "Arab Spring" revolutions came, so, you know, the type of things they're talking about would be like that but on - perhaps happening much more frequently.

Nkem Ifejika: That's our environment correspondent Matt McGrath.