Climate change exacerbates the environmental impacts of agriculture
Abstract
Agriculture’s global environmental impacts are widely expected to continue expanding, driven by population and economic growth and dietary changes. This Review highlights climate change as an additional amplifier of agriculture’s environmental impacts, by reducing agricultural productivity, reducing the efficacy of agrochemicals, increasing soil erosion, accelerating the growth and expanding the range of crop diseases and pests, and increasing land clearing. We identify multiple pathways through which climate change intensifies agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, creating a potentially powerful climate change–reinforcing feedback loop. The challenges raised by climate change underscore the urgent need to transition to sustainable, climate-resilient agricultural systems. This requires investments that both accelerate adoption of proven solutions that provide multiple benefits, and that discover and scale new beneficial processes and food products. Editor’s summary Intensive agriculture creates multiple environmental challenges, including runoff of excess nutrients, use of chemical pesticides, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. Curbing these negative effects of agriculture while feeding a growing global population is already a massive challenge and one that will likely be exacerbated by climate change. Yang et al. reviewed the research on interactions between climate change and agriculture’s environmental impacts and found that most of this work suggests even…
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