mangoes and pomegranates from Spain, litchis and bananas from the South of Italy. Climate change has expanded the range of grown in Europe agricultural products are already strong, and some of the once-exotic fruits and naturalized. But potatoes from the Siberian Tundra, or Corn and soybeans from the still frozen North of Canada? A new study shows that the already in a few decades, realistic scenarios.

While the income is expected to deteriorate in some warm regions, due to increasing droughts and heat waves, are opening up previously inhospitable areas on a large scale of possibilities for agricultural use. In view of a globally rising demand for food according to a lot of the prospects to be promising, sounds, could, at the same time go hand in hand with environmental pollution, unparalleled in the modern history of their peers, warn researchers in the US Ecologist Lee Hannah in your in the journal "PLOS One" published a study.

especially in the boreal regions in Russia and Canada could become new agricultural centres. to get

a picture of the global agriculture of the future, the researchers examined what the new regions are in the future, suitable for the cultivation of important food crops such as wheat, Corn, sugar, rice, oil seeds or soy. The modeling on the Basis of more than a dozen climate models that is expected to expand for agriculture suitable land in the next 50 to 100 years by almost a third.

especially the Northern boreal regions in Russia and Canada could become new global centers of food production. In both countries, conditional displacement of the agricultural boundaries in addition, the modeling according to the climate more than four million square kilometres of new acreage.

According to Figures from the United Nations, global food production must be doubled by 2050, a world population expected to reach 10 billion mouths to feed.

For Canada, this meant the Chance of a doubling of agricultural production. With wheat, potatoes, Corn, and soy-four of the world's most important crop species are cold-resistant enough to be there in the future grown. "In a warming world, the North of Canada could be our breadbasket of the future," the researchers write.

the inhospitable mountain regions of Central Asia and the Rocky Mountains are identified as a new agriculture areas. Even some of the border regions Australian and African desert belt could be estimated according to some – however, as unsafe imported models of higher rainfall will benefit, and, in the future, a role for nutrition to play.

"The pressure to use the new limits in fact, agrarian, and will continue to grow in the mass, in the previous areas of cultivation climate change will be less suitable," says lead author Hannah. According to Figures from the United Nations, global food production must be doubled by 2050, to be able to then to almost ten billion people increase in the world population to feed.

Devastating effects on biodiversity

The agricultural use of previously untouched nature but is to be had only at the price of immense damage to the environment too. So, the danger is that by the use of large quantities of agricultural chemicals will endanger the quality of drinking water for nearly two billion people there. Also, the impact on the species diversity in tropical as in the Northern regions will be devastating if the newly-accessible regions for agriculture would be developed, to analyze the authors. Thus, the potential of the new agriculture overlapped areas with 20 of the most species-rich regions of the earth.

probably The most serious effects of climate change promoted a massive expansion of agricultural production would have been but for the fight against global warming itself. By the processing of the soil, huge amounts of carbon would be set free is stored in the previously unused soil. The future of the usable areas in the world with the carbon richest soil, said Ronald Vargas, soil expert of the food and agriculture organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Thomson Reuters Foundation. As soon as it get there on a large scale to agricultural use, will rapid global warming in the height.

climate change brings with it new agricultural opportunities

the authors of the current study is to assess the climate impact of future use as a dramatically. "If it is allowed in the agriculture, in all identified areas, there is little Chance that the objectives of the Paris climate protection agreement to comply with", they write. The scientists calculate that with full use of all the new areas, a release of 177 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. That's the equivalent of more than 100 years of current carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

climate change offer vast opportunities for the food security of the people, to be accounted for by the scientists. It was, however, the potential of careful potential.

the environmental approach could be, for example, in areas with carbon rich soils to abandon the agricultural use. Also, a stronger change of direction could help areas to a vegetarian diet, and the more intensive use of existing agricultural, to find the Balance between security of supply and protection of resources. None of these strategies bring as much new food as the management of newly emerging suitable areas.

Created: 09.03.2020, 17:18 PM