During a three and a half hour conference at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday, two panels of agricultural experts said climate change is important to agriculture because it has reduced yields, but it is unclear yet whether the current policies will achieve the goals of governments to hold back temperature increases, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and assure food security.
On a first global panel, Mark Rosegrant, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that rising temperatures have reduced yields, but the impact has been greater in tropical areas than in temperate climates and wheat yields have actually risen in higher latitude areas.
David Zilberman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said he is more worried that climate change will lead to migration than he is worried about the food supply.
“Humans are bad at dealing with migration,” he said, also noting that the impact varies from place to place.
The Paris Agreement to address climate change “looks nice but there is not a lot of action,” Zilberman said.
Agriculture can play a huge role in solving climate change and there are opportunities for agriculture in climate change, but agriculture’s role depends on “the bioeconomy,” he said.
The old bioeconomy, Zilberman said, was based on fermentation, while the new bioeconomy is based on molecular biology and in …