Description

Climate change is the most significant challenge to achieving sustainable development, and it threatens to drag millions of people into grinding poverty. At the same time, we have never had better know-how and solutions available to avert the crisis and create opportunities for a better life for people all over the world. Climate change is not just a long-term issue. It is happening today, and it entails uncertainties for policy makers trying to shape the future. Climate change affects agriculture and food production in complex ways. It affects food production directly through changes in agro-ecological conditions and indirectly by affecting growth and distribution of incomes, and thus demand for agricultural produce. Impacts have been quantified in numerous studies and under various sets of assumptions. A selection of these results is presented in Quantifying the Impacts on Food Security. Here it is useful to summarize the main alterations in the agro-ecological environment that are associated with climate change. Climate models for the substantiation of theories regarding global warming rely heavily on the measurement of long-term changes in global average sea level. Global sea level change for much of the last century has generally been estimated using tide gauge measurements collated over long periods of time to give a long-term average. Sustainable development is widely advocated as the way to deal with the issues that fill the pages of this publication. The concept is, however, hard to apply in practice, and easy to manipulate. These days many promote ësustainabilityí, including some who are only interested in sustaining that which benefits them directly. But to make the world a better place for all, current practices must change. The term ësustainable developmentí implies that some forms of development cannot be sustained (continued indefinitely). The book provides a clear and concise account of global climate change at a level suitable for the readers.