How will climate change affect the world’s dinner plates?

Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need, a new book from an imprint of Cornell University Press, presents a global climate tour of Earth’s foods – from vegetables, grains and meats to beverages and desserts – from the perspective of climate reality and explains how a warming world will affect your dinner plate. The book is intended for audiences in developed countries, but especially the US, which has contributed the most to climate change and has the capacity to bring about the needed changes nationally and globally.

We have seen more record-breaking heat, more intense storms, melting ice, warming oceans and rising seas,“ said Hoffmann, a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. “Climate change is a threat in the present and your meals will likely be quite different in just a few decades. No country in the world is immune and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals target several ways to address this grand challenge.

# Rice, for example, is a ubiquitous grain in more than 100 countries and provides half of the calories for 520 million people living in Asia. In its many forms, this grain is grown submerged in water , or as upland rice, grown mostly dependent on rainfall.

But the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization warns that unless agricultural practices improve, water scarcity and high temperatures could reduce rice yields in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam to 50% of today’s levels by the year 2100.

To address these challenges, the UN’s SDG #2 has set a 2030 target for implementing resilient agricultural practices that strengthen the capacity of farmers to adapt to climate change. They also see the maintenance of the genetic diversity crop and wild species critically important. Along with other targets, the aim is to end hunger, achieve food security and promote sustainable agriculture.

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