Assessing the consequences of climate change for food security: A view from the intergovernmental panel on climate change

Considerable progress in understanding how global climate change is likely to affect agricultural production and forest resources has been made in recent years. In the recent Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group (WG) II (IPCC, 2001), agriculture was combined in a chapter with other, less managed terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in order to assess its response to climate change. This was intended to facilitate comparison of the impacts of climate change on basic biological and ecological processes across ecosystems (including agroecosystems and forest ecosystems) in a consistent manner. However, agroecosystems are fundamentally different from less managed ecosystems such as wetlands, tundra, and savannas: they produce economically valuable goods and services within a system of clear and enforceable property rights. Such greatly complicates understanding of their response to climate change because of intense human intervention into climate-ecosystem interactions and because responses of these ecosystems to climate change can have direct and immediate economic impacts. Hence, I focus on agriculture in this chapter.