Chapter Four: A Changing Climate

If temperatures are too hot, plants and animals as well as the workers tending to them suffer greatly. If there is too little rain, or too much, crops will fail. Climate change is here and we now face these challenges every year as the world breaks its previous record for global temperature. The trend of rising heat-trapping, greenhouse gas emissions is not expected to reverse any time soon. Can farmers adapt to the new climate? Will temperatures continue to rise indefinitely, or is there something that can be done to slow the changes? How will policies affect farming, which is in itself a significant source of greenhouse gases? Drs. Tom Hertel and Jeff Dukes answer these questions and more in this chapter on climate change and its impact on our ability to feed the world.

 

 

Dr. Thomas W. Hertel is the founder and executive director of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) and is a distinguished professor of agricultural economics and adjunct professor of economics at Purdue University. He is a Fellow, and Past-President, of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). His book, Poverty and the WTO (co-edited with L. Alan Winters), received the AAEA Quality of Communication award.

 

 

Dr. Jeffrey S. Dukes is the director of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center. He is a professor in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and Biological Sciences at Purdue University. Dukes also leads the INTERFACE research coordination network, and directs the Boston-Area Climate Experiment (BACE).