Abstract
Earlier studies have noted potential adverse impacts of land-related emissions mitigation strategies on food security, particularly due to food price increases-but without distinguishing these strategies' individual effects under different conditions. Using six global agroeconomic models, we show the extent to which three factors-non-CO2 emissions reduction, bioenergy production and afforestation-may change food security and agricultural market conditions under 2 °C climate-stabilization scenarios. Results show that afforestation (often simulated in the models by imposing carbon prices on land carbon stocks) could have a large impact on food security relative to non-CO2 emissions policies (generally implemented as emissions taxes). Respectively, these measures put an additional 41.9 million and 26.7 million people at risk of hunger in 2050 compared with the current trend scenario baseline. This highlights the need for better coordination in emissions reduction and agricultural market management policies as well as better representation of land use and associated greenhouse gas emissions in modelling.
Highlights
In meeting near- and long-term climate change mitigation goals, the energy sector accounts for the majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in most nations and is the target of most present-day emissions mitigation policies
Hasegawa et al highlighted remarkable food security concerns associated with the inclusion of AFOLU in climate change mitigation actions[7]; they compared the impacts of climate change and its mitigation on agricultural production and concluded that the latter would be larger[7]
The scenarios analysed in this study assume the socioeconomic background of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) 2, and for the climate policy scenarios, representative concentration pathway (RCP) 2.6 equivalent carbon prices are applied, which are taken from the SSP database
Summary
In meeting near- and long-term climate change mitigation goals (for example, the Paris Agreement), the energy sector accounts for the majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in most nations and is the target of most present-day emissions mitigation policies. The third channel is afforestation policies, which incentivize a reduction in cropland and pastureland supply While these secondary impacts of AFOLU emissions mitigation have been addressed in the literature[13,14], and one such study proposes inclusive policy designs to prevent adverse side effects, the present body of knowledge has not identified the relative importance of the factors that drive potential food security risk in a single consistent analytical framework. Lifestyle changes these three factors and climate change impacts on yield but did not consider the stringent climate policy in line with the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit the global mean temperature increase to below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels, and limited physical indicators such as emissions, bioenergy, land use and the number of people at risk of hunger are reported. Neither do we consider climate variability, which has been discussed in the literature, but these should be carefully considered as recent literature reports[31]
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