Nutrition end of the course summary

Nutrition end of the course summary ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED AND ORIGINAL ESSAY PAPERS ON Nutrition end of the course summary There are three presentations from the quarter. For each, write a paragraph containing the takeaway message(s) from the presentation and explain why you found this particular presentation interesting and noteworthy—or not impressive at all. Making the connection between the required readings for each speaker and/or concepts presented by other seminar speakers and the speaker’s lecture is encouraged. One-and a-half pages maximum, single spaced. Nutrition end of the course summary There are two more files I will upload it later. week3_reading1.pptx week_3_reading_2.pdf week_3_lecture.pptx 1 Infographic from UK/US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience Released on August 14 SYNTHESIS REPORT Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system Contents Foreword 1 This report originates from a Taskforce of academics, industry and policy experts to examine the resilience of the global food system to extreme weather events. The Taskforce was brought together by the UK’s Global Food Security programme and was jointly commissioned by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and UK Government Science and Innovation Network. This Synthesis report on Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system, sits in the context of three detailed sub reports on Climate and global production shocks, Review of the responses to food production shocks and Country level impacts of Global Production Shocks. There is also an overall Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system summary report. The contents of these reports are based upon workshop discussions held at Willis Tower, Chicago in October 2014 and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London in February 2015 (see Appendix for a full list). This report should be cited as: Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system (2015). Final Project Report from the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience, The Global Food Security programme, UK. Authors The following are the lead authors for this report, in alphabetical order (*=coordinating lead authors): Rob Bailey*(Chatham House, UK) Tim G. Benton* (UK Global Food Security Programme & University of Leeds, UK) Andy Challinor (University of Leeds, UK) Joshua Elliott* (Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, USA) Executive summary 2 1. Food demand and supply and the impact of weather in a changing world 3 2. The US-UK Taskforce on extreme weather & global food system resilience 4 3. Weather and shocks to the global food system 5 4. Policy and market responses to weather-influenced production shocks 7 5. How would a plausible worst case scenario impact on societies, economies and the environment? 10 6. Key recommendations for increasing resilience to production shocks at global and local levels 11 Visual summary of scenarios Appendix 14 References 16 David Gustafson*(ILSI Research Foundation, Washington, USA) Bradley Hiller (Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, UK) Aled Jones* (Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, UK) Molly Jahn (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) Chris Kent (Met Office, UK) Kirsty Lewis* (Met Office, UK) Theresa Meacham (UK Global Food Security Programme) Mike Rivington (The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK) David Robson (Scottish Government, UK) Richard Tiffin*(Centre for Food Security, University of Reading, UK) Donald J. Wuebbles (Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois, USA) Plus contributors to report and attendees at workshops in Chicago and London Electronic versions of the report series may be found at the addresses below: Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system summary report www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/assets/pdfs/extreme-weather-resilience-of-global-food-system.pdf Climate and Global Crop Production Shocks www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/assets/pdfs/climate-and-global-crop-production-shocks.pdf Review of the responses to food production shocks www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/assets/pdfs/review-of-responses-to-food-production-shocks.pdf Country level impacts of Global Production Shocks www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/assets/pdfs/country-impacts-of-global-grain-production-shocks.pdf Front cover: simazoran/istockphoto.com 12 Foreword This report makes a vital contribution to the study of the risks facing the international food system and helpfully identifies areas where more work is needed.Nutrition end of the course summary We know that the climate is changing and weather records are being broken all the time. Some of these weather records make a big impact on people – their ability to make a living and feed their families and in some cases their vulnerability to extreme events. Looking ahead, we can see that the world is changing, but we are not yet in a position to understand in detail what the weather will look like, and what the events will be that impact upon people’s lives the most. Sir David King UK Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change and former UK Government Chief Scientist The food system we increasingly rely on is a global enterprise. Up to now it’s been pretty robust and extreme weather has had limited impact on a global scale. But if the risks of an event are growing, and it could be unprecedented in scale and extent, how well prepared are we? Especially in the context of an international food system that over time has become increasingly efficient and therefore less resilient, the risks are serious and should be a cause for concern. Given the potentially huge impacts such an event could have in our increasingly interconnected world, we should be looking carefully at even very low probability situations and the likelihood of the scenarios suggested in this report are far too significant to ignore. This report examines some of the things we know and identifies areas where we need to know more. It imagines a plausible worst case scenario for the near future, and uses this to look at responses and impacts. It is useful in making us think about ensuring that when such events happen we take timely steps that make the situation better and not worse as well as what we can do now to prepare. | 1 Executive summary A Taskforce of academics, industry and policy experts was commissioned to examine the resilience of the global food system to extreme weather. This summary is built on three detailed reports: Climate and global production shocks (Annex A), Review of the responses to production shocks (Annex B) and the Country-level impacts of global grain production shocks (Annex C). We present evidence that the global food system is vulnerable to production shocks caused by extreme weather, and that this risk is growing. Although much more work needs to be done to reduce uncertainty, preliminary analysis of limited existing data suggests that the risk of a 1-in-100 year production shock is likely to increase to 1-in-30 or more by 2040. Additionally, recent studies suggest that our reliance on increasing volumes of global trade, whilst having many benefits, also creates structural vulnerability via a liability to amplify production shocks in some circumstances. Action is therefore needed to improve the resilience of the global food system to weather-related shocks, to mitigate their impact on people. A visual of the scenarios in the report can be found on pages 12-13. Key recommendations include: Understand the risks better More research is needed to understand and quantify the risks set out in this report. Our assessment is that they are non-trivial and increasing, but our knowledge of how extreme weather may be connected across the world, and hence the precise probability of multiple bread basket failures, is limited by available model simulations. Modelling limitations also constrain our ability to understand how production shocks translate into short run price impacts. Explore opportunities for coordinated risk management As knowledge emerges regarding plausible worst case scenarios, it will be possible for governments, international institutions and businesses to develop contingency plans and establish early warning systems with agreed response protocols. Other opportunities include coordinated management of emergency and/or strategic reserves. Nutrition end of the course summary 2 | Improve the functioning of international markets History demonstrates that the actions of market participants in response to production losses, or the behaviours of other actors, are a crucial determinant of price impacts. Other problems that can exacerbate price spikes include low levels of stocks relative to consumption, poor transparency of market information and physical limitations on trade such as infrastructural constraints. Bolster national resilience to market shocks Governments should also consider policies to bolster national resilience to international market shocks. This is a particularly important policy agenda for import dependent developing countries with high numbers of poor food consumers, and/or high risk of political instability. The precise mix of appropriate policy measures will vary according to national context. Adapt agriculture for a changing climate Agriculture faces a triple challenge. Productivity must be increased by reversing declines in yield growth and closing the gap between actual and attainable yields in the developing world, whilst also reducing its environmental impact (eg 50:1 degradation, depletion of freshwater supplies, increasing greenhouse gas emissions or eutrophication). However, given the increasing risk of extreme weather, this cannot come at the expense of production resilience. Increases in productivity, sustainability and resilience to climate change are required. This will require significant investment from the public and private sectors, as well as new cross-sector collaborations. 1. Food demand and supply and the impact of weather in a changing world By 2050, the FAO estimates that demand for food will increase over 60% above the current situation. Demand growth is driven by population and demographic change, and increasing global wealth. This, in turn, leads to greater per capita food demand, often associated with demand for more livestock produce. In 2007/8, a small weather-related production shock, coupled with historically low stock-to-use levels, led to rapid food price inflation, as measured by the FAO Food Price Index and associated with the main internationally traded grains1. This increase was compounded by some countries imposing barriers to local export, to ensure their own food security, leading to an FAO price spike of over 100%. A similar price spike occurred in 2010/11, partly influenced by weather in Eastern Europe and Russia2. There is now very extensive and convincing evidence that the climate4 is changing5. Climate change can lead to a change in the mean (average) of a climatic variable, like temperature or rainfall, and/or its variability6. Changes in variability are just as important as changes in the average. To caricature this, climate change may result, on average, in an area getting wetter; however, if the variance is also increasing, it is possible for both floods and droughts to become more common. As extreme weather is often associated with the highest impacts on human systems, understanding exactly how the shape of the distribution of weather will change relative to the mean is important7. Whilst there is currently incomplete understanding of how extremes will change (see discussion in Annex A), there is nonetheless good evidence that extreme weather events, from intense storms to droughts and heatwaves, are increasing in frequency and severity at a considerable rate8. Most agriculture is climate dependent. Weather’s variability determines the relative productivity of the seasons9, and thus underpins variation in global food markets and determines the spatial distribution of agriculture.Nutrition end of the course summary If production variability is also being driven by increasing variability of the weather across years, it implies there will be increased within-season price instability coupled with longer term challenges to the structure of the food system. The impact of changing patterns of extreme weather on global food istockphoto.com These spikes created a number of significant impacts around the world. In rich countries, where food is freely available, food price inflation was significant and the poorest suffered, resulting in people trading down on food quality or quantity, and in the process spending significantly more. In poorer countries, especially those with fragile governance, rapid food price inflation undermined civil order, and, in part was a spark for the Arab Spring and the consequences that have followed3. In 2012, the worst drought to hit the American Midwest for half a century triggered comparable spikes in international maize and soybean prices. This sequence of price spikes, and their consequences, re-alerted the world to the need to focus on global food availability and the volatility in its supply. Sir John Beddington’s powerful analogy of “the perfect storm” – of rising demand for food, water and energy whilst climate change creates increasing constraints – became a call to action on how to manage demand growth in a world under pressure. system resilience therefore requires more investigation. It is easier to make inferences from climate models and historical data about the average climate than it is about the extremes of the distribution, because by their very nature these events are rare, so sample sizes are small. Inferences about extremes are therefore much more uncertain. So, whilst climate models give us a good understanding of how climate may change in future, our understanding of the way extreme events may change is much less certain. For example, the authors of a recent paper10 comparing data to model predictions of extreme rainfall, concluded: “Our results also show that the global climate models we used may have underestimated the observed trend, which implies that extreme precipitation events may strengthen more quickly in the future than projected and that they may have more severe impacts than estimated.” In addition, for some climate phenomena (such as the way that large scale circulation patterns like the southern oscillation may change), inter-model comparison shows considerable variability11. Given that “it is difficult to rank models for their accuracy, …any model integration can be considered equally valid, and those that indicate [worse] conditions imply a future potential risk”12. In other words the rarest conditions are the most uncertain and difficult to study, but because they are also typically the most impactful, their study is most important. | 3 2. The US-UK Taskforce on extreme weather & global food system resilience In 2012, Sir John Beddington, then UK Government Chief Scientific Advisor, commissioned a report on food system resilience from the UK’s Food Research Partnership. That report13 concluded: The complexity of interactions between the global food supply chain and global weather means that the impacts of a particular weather event will vary with the location, timing and the overall context. Nutrition end of the course summary The evidence is not available properly to describe with any certainty how variable weather will impact on food production systems and worldwide trade, but our contention is that we need greater investigation of what they could be, with perhaps greater consideration being given to reasonable “worst case scenarios”. … The weather in 2012 (drought to floods in the UK, drought, heatwave, floods across the rest of the Northern Hemisphere) cautions us to consider fully that weather may simultaneously impact in different places separated widely in space, and that therefore there is potential for widespread impacts on food supply. Given that the frequency of weather extremes is increasing, the potential for large impacts, and unprecedented ones, is growing. In 2014, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UK Government Science and Innovation Network (supported also by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) jointly commissioned the UK’s Global Food Security programme to bring together a cross-disciplinary UK-US taskforce of experts (see Appendix A) to examine the risks of extreme weather’s impact on the food system, the responses the market and policy actors may make to any shortfall in production, and the impacts this may lead to (Figure 1). Given better understanding of climatic risks, likely responses and impacts, a further aim was to highlight positive actions to reduce impacts on people and markets. The Taskforce’s work also highlights gaps in our understanding and where further research is needed. This report summarises the outputs from the Taskforce into three areas: (i) how the changing weather may create shocks to the global food system (Section 3, Annex A), and, from this the development of a “plausible” worst case scenario for a shock; (ii) plausible market and policy responses to the worst case scenario (Section 4, Annex B); and (iii) how the combination of scenario and responses may impact upon different societies, economies and the environment (Section 5, Annex C). eg ECONOMIC -­? POLITICAL -­? SOCIAL – Nutrition end of the course summary TECHNOLOGICAL Weather Events Food Produc2on SHOCK eg INFRASTRUCTURE – ENVIRONMENT RESPONSE to shocks Prices… Imports… Exports… IMPACTS eg STATE -­? CORPORATE – MARKET SYSTEMIC AMPLIFYING AND MITIGATING FACTORS Figure 1: The conceptual framework for devising and assessing different scenarios of disruption to the food supply chain. Analysis was fixed around the two quantitative reference points of a shock to production (in terms of total loss), and the effects on food prices, imports and exports. The disruption pathways described how (a) climatological conditions that could create the shocks (e.g. droughts, storms) and their likelihood, (b) the most plausible and likely policy and market responses to the shock, and (c) the pathways that will result in the global food security impacts. 4 | 3. Weather and shocks to the global food system Food production of the globally most important commodity crops (maize, soybean, wheat and rice) comes from a small number of major producing countries. The exposure of a large proportion of global production of the major crops is therefore concentrated in particular parts of the globe (Figure 2), and so extreme weather events in these regions have the largest impact on global food production. Simultaneous extreme weather events in two or more of these regions – creating a multiple bread basket failure – would represent a serious production shock, however understanding the covariance of extreme weather events in different production regions is currently under-researched. There is an urgent need to understand the driving dynamics of meteorological teleconnections, such as the El Niño – which may be becoming more extreme – in order to quantify the likelihoods of coincident production shocks in major food-producing regions. By examining production shocks in the recent past, we show that weather events, particularly drought, are a major driver of these shocks. Using the example of these past events we generated a set of scenarios, in the present or near-future, of weather-driven production shocks for each of the four crops (Annex A). These we combined to create a plausible worst case scenario (Box 1). Figure 2. Proportion of the total calories coming from the main four commodity crops per country. Within each country, agricultural production is also typically concentrated (see fig S7a in Foley 2011 for a spatially resolved map). For example, the bulk of calories produced in the US come from soy and maize in the Midwest, in Brazil agricultural production, mainly soy, is concentrated inland from the SE coast; rice predominantly comes from the Indo-Gangetic plain, SE China and SE Asia) and wheat production is concentrated in NW Europe and around the Black Sea. Box 1: Plausible scenario for extreme weather’s impacts on crop production Analysis of the historical records indicated that in 1988/89 there was a significant drought-related impact on the yields of maize and soybean, and in 2002/3 drought impacted on wheat in Europe, Russia, India and … Get a 10 % discount on an order above $ 100 Use the following coupon code : NURSING10