How will agriculture change in the face of global warming?
As the global climate warms, crop yields are likely to decrease in many parts of the world due to higher temperatures, more frequent and severe droughts, flooding and coastal inundation, and severe weather. In addition, warming will likely increase the range of some crop pests. Operational yield traits such as drought and heat tolerance, as well as intrinsic yield, must therefore be improved. At the same time, industrial agriculture is now a major contributor to global warming, producing by some estimates 20 percent of the world’s emissions of heat-trapping gases, and some methods of increasing yield can exacerbate this negative impact. For example, crops that achieve higher intrinsic yield often require more fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizer, some of which is converted by soil microbes into nitrous oxide, a heat-trapping gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Minimizing global agriculture’s future climate impact will require investment in drought-tolerant and other