Climate change and agriculture

Abstract

Providing sufficient food for the world’s people is one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century. There is now real concern that global warming, with its potential for affecting the climate regimes of entire regions, will exacerbate the world’s food-production problems. Interactions of agriculture and the natural environment under a changing climate will have large-scale reverberations: altering rates of soil erosion, increasing competition for water resources, expanding the use of agricultural chemicals, and affecting wildlife habitats. However, many good farm-management practices buffer against climate changes and reduce greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere.