Study: Climate Change Could Lead to Food Unrest in 50 Years

Essay by Eric Worrall

If only there was a way to preserve and stockpile of food, to help carry us through shortages.

Climate change could lead to food-relatedcivil unrest in UK within 50 years, say experts

Sarah Bridle Professor of Food, Climate and Society, University of York
Aled Jones Professor & Director, Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University
Published: October 12, 2023 11.31pm AEDT

The emptying of supermarket shelves during the COVID pandemic demonstrated the chaos that disruption to the UK’s food supply can provoke. Could this type of disruption have a different cause in the future? And what might the impact on society be?

These are the questions we sought to answer in our new study, which involved surveying 58 leading UK food experts spanning academia, policy, charitable organisations and business. 

Our findings indicate that food shortages stemming from extreme weather events could potentially lead to civil unrest in the UK within 50 years. Shortages of staple carbohydrates like wheat, bread, pasta and cereal appear to be the most likely triggers of such unrest.

The UK’s food system appears to be particularly vulnerable to significant disruption. This vulnerability can be attributed, in part, to its emphasis on efficiency at the expense of resilience (the ability to withstand and recover from shocks). This approach includes a heavy reliance on seasonal labour and practices like “just-in-time” supply chains, where products are delivered precisely when needed.

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Read more: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-could-lead-to-food-related-civil-unrest-in-uk-within-50-years-say-experts-214754

The abstract of the study;

Scoping Potential Routes to UK Civil Unrest via the Food System: Results of a Structured Expert Elicitation 

by Aled Jones ^1,*,†, Sarah Bridle ^2,†, Katherine Denby ³, Riaz Bhunnoo ⁴, Daniel Morton ⁵, Lucy Stanbrough ⁶, Barnaby Coupe ⁷, Vanessa Pilley ⁸, Tim Benton ⁹, Pete Falloon ^10,11, Tom K. Matthews ¹², Saher Hasnain ¹³, John S. Heslop-Harrison ¹⁴, Simon Beard ¹⁵, Julie Pierce ¹⁶, Jules Pretty ¹⁷, Monika Zurek ¹³, Alexandra Johnstone ¹⁸, Pete Smith ¹⁹, Neil Gunn ⁶, Molly Watson ², Edward Pope ¹⁰, Asaf Tzachor ^15,20, Caitlin Douglas ¹², Christian Reynolds ²¹, Neil Ward ²², Jez Fredenburgh ²², Clare Pettinger ²³, Tom Quested ²⁴, Juan Pablo Cordero ², Clive Mitchell ²⁵, Carrie Bewick ²⁶, Cameron Brown ⁶, Christopher Brown ²⁷, Paul J. Burgess ²⁸, Andy Challinor ²⁹, Andrew Cottrell ¹⁰, Thomas Crocker ¹⁰, Thomas George ⁸, Charles J. Godfray ³⁰, Rosie S. Hails ³¹, John Ingram ¹², Tim Lang ²⁰, Fergus Lyon ³², Simon Lusher ⁶, Tom MacMillan ³³, Sue Newton ⁶, Simon Pearson ³⁴, Sue Pritchard ³⁵, Dale Sanders ³⁶, Angelina Sanderson Bellamy ³⁷, Megan Steven ⁶, Alastair Trickett ³⁸, Andrew Voysey ³⁹, Christine Watson ⁴⁰, Darren Whitby ¹⁶ and Kerry Whiteside ⁴¹

Abstract

We report the results of a structured expert elicitation to identify the most likely types of potential food system disruption scenarios for the UK, focusing on routes to civil unrest. We take a backcasting approach by defining as an end-point a societal event in which 1 in 2000 people have been injured in the UK, which 40% of experts rated as “Possible (20–50%)”, “More likely than not (50–80%)” or “Very likely (>80%)” over the coming decade. Over a timeframe of 50 years, this increased to 80% of experts. The experts considered two food system scenarios and ranked their plausibility of contributing to the given societal scenario. For a timescale of 10 years, the majority identified a food distribution problem as the most likely. Over a timescale of 50 years, the experts were more evenly split between the two scenarios, but over half thought the most likely route to civil unrest would be a lack of total food in the UK. However, the experts stressed that the various causes of food system disruption are interconnected and can create cascading risks, highlighting the importance of a systems approach. We encourage food system stakeholders to use these results in their risk planning and recommend future work to support prevention, preparedness, response and recovery planning.

Read more: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/20/14783

The full study is a little more interesting than the Conversation article, they discuss supply chain disruptions which might actually happen, such as a repeat of the Carrington event, a coronal solar mass ejection which could do widespread damage to fragile electrical systems.

But the suggestion climate change might cause such disruption is absurd.

We’re used to unseasonal foods pretty much any time of year, because high speed global transport, including air cargo, ensures we have access to whatever we need or want. A decade ago, when the lettuce crop failed in Spain due to heavy rain, within a week lettuce imported from the United States was hitting the shelves of British supermarkets.

What if a major disaster, a coronal mass ejection or global war cut shipping routes?

This would be a very uncomfortable time for the UK, if it caught Britain unprepared. But slow moving changes are not in the same category as an out of the blue catastrophe which suddenly destroys global communications and shipping navigation systems. Any warning, like a significant uptick in weather disasters leading up to shortages, and a little preparation, would make it easy to cope with any supply disruption.

Our ancestors solved the problem of surviving for months without fresh food. Jams, conserves, pickles, canning, drying, there is a long list of ways to make foods outlast their normal shelf life.

Absolute worst case any climate related supply disruptions would be temporary, and could easily be bridged with a stockpile of preserved or frozen food. We already know from the paleo record that global warming is no threat to average global food production, regardless of the alleged impact on localised weather disasters.

During the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, one species which did notably well were our monkey ancestors. If a bunch of monkey ancestors with brains the size of matchboxes could figure out how to thrive in a much warmer world, I’m pretty sure we could figure it out.

The only real threat to food production is our government’s policy responses to climate change – ill considered government policies which drive up the price of food and energy, attacks on global shipping which threaten to make mass transport of food and other goods impractically expensive. The simultaneous political attacks on affordable energy, nitrate fertiliser and agricultural pesticides and fungicides are a grave risk to prosperity and food production. If any food shortages occur in the next few years, the culprit is far more likely to be climate policy than climate change.