Food producers must adapt to cope with climate change

12-Jun-2014 - Last updated on 13-Jun-2014 at 09:47 GMT

Coping with climate change: governments should make better use of new technologies

Governments and the food industry need to make better use of modelling and new technologies to manage food supply as climate change makes the whole system far more fragile, an environmental expert and joint Nobel Prize winning laureate has warned.

Dr Richard Tipper, chairman of environmental consultancy Ecometrica, believes innovative tools such as geospatial data analysis can assist decision makers shape future policies, to mitigate the risk of disruption to their supply chains and secure a competitive advantage.

Tipper was the lead author on two reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the Nobel Prize in 2007. The tools that Ecometrica has since developed help with planning and investment in the intensive sowing of new types of crops, which can cope with changing environmental conditions.

Will have to adapt

“It is something that agriculture is going to have to adapt to and I take the view that society will adapt. Obviously it will cause disruption and difficulty, pain and a certain amount of suffering for possibly quite a lot of people, but humans are extremely adaptable and farmers have adapted over the millennia,” said Tipper.

While many firms would continue to rely on commodity markets, Tipper reckoned a more “hands on approach”, where manufacturers and retailers worked closely with producers in the developing world to help them become more sustainable, could be a more successful approach in securing future supplies of food.

“I am not trying to underestimate the magnitude of the problem, but I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom; there are some promising technologies and some of the people who are talking about the scale of degradation and land loss are overestimating it,” he said.

Not optimistic

Despite this, Tipper added: “I am not so optimistic that governments will find solutions until the problems start getting much worse and until the technologies become more widely available.” There were signs that some progress was being made at the technology level and there were some “serious moves” by China, Europe and the US, “but not nearly enough to address the problem”, he said.

“Where I am more optimistic is on the ability of society and the food sector to adapt to more extreme events and changing growing conditions,” he added.