It used to be much tougher starting a piece about the weather. Even though many of us can’t help talking about it, the fact it’s still derided as boring filler for awkward chats at the school gates or family birthdays meant finding a snappy intro could often be a tricky task.
Well, not any more. With ongoing heatwaves offering a visceral glimpse of the world’s rapid deterioration, weather can quite rightly now be framed as a genuine and imminent existential threat to human civilisation. That’s much more exciting.
It’s also helped by some big improvements in naming. Storm Dave is OK but it’s hardly the ‘Godzilla’ El Niño. This weather actually has it all, in that it’s both fun to say and absolutely terrifying.
Because worryingly, the El Niño currently building over the Pacific has a particularly high chance of developing into a “very strong” event. If true, this will exacerbate existing strains on global food supplies and drive up food prices around the world.
According to analysts at Goldman Sachs, global food commodity prices could rise by as much as 16% by 2029, with the effects likely to fall most heavily on countries in the global south, which are already the hardest hit by the spikes in fertiliser costs.
These heatwaves are small fry
In the UK, more than 10% of food imports are at risk, according to the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, which predicted rice, fruit, and coffee will be the worst hit.
While scary, it’s a valuable foresight of things to come – much like the weather currently stifling all of Britain. Because while the current wildfires and drought are understandably a concern to farmers and others, they are small fry compared with what’s coming.
Chunks of farmland will be lost this year, but the UK’s Climate Change Committee has warned that if we remain on course for 2ºC of global warming the amount of high-quality farmland in England and Wales will plummet from around 40% to just over 10% by 2050.
The real question we should be asking right now is not how to insulate against the effects of this particular El Niño, or even the next one; but what structural issues they are exposing that must be fixed to keep people fed over the next century?
One thing becoming clear is the inability of farmers both in the UK and abroad to adapt to this changing climate – just one of the consequences of inadequate funding for new technologies. The shortfall in climate financing for farmers was highlighted by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) last year, which concluded food and agriculture is receiving a fraction of the money it needs to keep producing in the face of weather extremes.
While overall climate finance grew by 12% from 2022 to 2023, finance for food systems stagnated, with a mere 1% rise. Its share of total climate financing almost halved between 2009 and 2023 to just 4%. “This funding gap is unsustainable,” said Kaveh Zahedi of the FAO.
This is equally true in the UK, where the Climate Change Committee has warned that funding is a “significant barrier” to climate adaption. The money is clearly there, because it’s going into different sectors, but other obstacles are preventing one of the must crucial sectors from accessing it.
As always, it comes down to money. Governments, companies and financiers must learn from their past failures and give farmers the tools and money they desparately need to adapt to a changing world.
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