Page 84 - Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

levels, maturity of plants, etc. and transmitted by connected mobile technologies will also alter jobs
within agriculture and the food production chain.

Climate change has many implications for farming communities around the world and the global food
security. Box 20 contains facts and figures researched and published by the UN’s Food and Agriculture
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Organization (FAO) on how change climate affects the ability to grow food and feed humanity.

Box 20: Food security Facts and figures from the FAO 247

Food security: Facts and figures

• 75% of the world's poor and food-insecure people rely on agriculture and natural
resources for their livelihoods.
• The FAO estimates that world food production must rise 60% to keep pace with
demographic change. Climate change puts this at risk.
• Crop yield declines of 10 – 25% may be widespread by 2050 due to climate change.
• Rising temperatures will reduce catches of the world's main fish species by 40%.
• Although global emissions from deforestation have dropped, deforestation and forest
degradation account for 10 – 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions from
forest degradation (logging and fires) increased from 0.4 to 1.0 gt CO per year between
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1990 and 2015.
• Livestock contributes nearly two-thirds of agriculture's greenhouse and 78% of its
methane emissions.
• Climate change can transfer risks of food-borne diseases from one region to another,
threatening public health in new ways.

• The FAO estimates that the potential to reduce emissions from livestock production
(especially methane) is about 30% of baseline emissions.
• Currently, one-third of the food produced is either lost or wasted. The global costs
of food wastage are roughly USD 2.6 trillion every year, including USD 700 billion of
environmental costs and USD 900 billion of social costs.

• Global food loss and waste generate about 8% of humankind's annual GHG emissions.

To summarize the above, climate change creates risks of more natural disasters and environmental
problems, which can have the end effect of making it harder to grow food predictably. At the same
time, agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. As the world’s population grows,
societies need to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change by, for example, adjusting the sort
of crops they grow and optimizing the ways in which they are grown. This can be achieved through
the introduction of ‘digital agriculture’, which has been described as driving systemic change in the
sector using a range of technologies, channels and analytic capabilities to make farming more precise,
productive, and profitable. Box 21 illustrates how digital agriculture has been used successfully and
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subsequently scaled in farming communities across Colombia.

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