Climate Change Is Sapping Nutrients from Our Food — and It Could Become a Global Crisis

Feeding a planet inhabited by 10 billion people by mid-century — already a daunting task — is getting harder due to a little-known impact of global warming:  the decline of essential nutrients in the world’s staple foods that exist in almost every single person’s diet around the world.

The mechanism by which rising carbon dioxide saps nutrients from our food crops remains somewhat unclear, but the effect is consistent across most plant types from trees to grasses to edible crops:  It is reducing the availability of zinc, iron, protein, and key vitamins in wheat, rice, and several other fundamental grains and legumes.

The implications are huge:  By 2050, hundreds of millions of people could slip below the minimum thresholds of these nutrients needed for good health, and more than 2 billion already deficient could see their conditions worsen.  And it extends well beyond human nutrition as every animal in the biosphere depends, directly or indirectly, on plant consumption for nutrients.

These findings, which will appear this week as part of the most comprehensive review ever compiled on the two-way relationship between global warming and land use, highlight the urgent need to slash the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.  Human activity has increased atmospheric carbon more than 40 percent since the mid-19th century, enough to unleash a deadly onslaught of extreme weather made more destructive by rising seas.  Without a drastic drop in emissions, those levels will climb even more quickly over the coming decades.

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