Monday, July 10, 2017

11/07/2017: Food security and climate change

by Ioannis Tabetakis

Over the past weeks, there were some rather disappointing developments on climate change and related politics and politicians


 
Ioannis Tabetakis
The US has now opted out of the Paris Accord Agreement. The UK’s prime minister has failed to react strongly to that decision of the Trump’s administration making a lot of people wondering where UK’s government stands today.

Let’s have a look though why we need to bother about these developments. One of the most urgent problems that we need to face is the one of food security; i.e. Food Security (FS) stands for the production of nutritious food that is enough to feed all people on Earth.

FS has two dimensions: 1. Nutritional value of the produced food 2. Sustainable production of food Climate Change (CC) is a huge problem that we face as food scientists. CC makes the food production more difficult and more expensive.

Therefore, CC is a huge obstacle in our attempts to increase FS. Denial of CC is major political and scientific nonsense! Denial of CC jeopardises FS, in other words it may put human lives at risk. This risk is related to famine, malnutrition or even death.

Therefore, in our opinion, denying CC and Paris agreement is simply wrong and inhuman! On top of these developments, the recent elections in UK have brought some further developments that are related to CC and FS. At the moment (as these lines are being written), it looks like that UK will have a Tories-DUP government with Michael Gove as Environment Minister.

Theresa May’s choice of Mr Gove is rather surprising because she sacked him as Education Secretary last year. Past record of Mr Gove is not promising: his voting record reveals he has generally opted against eco-friendly measures, such as reduction in carbon emissions and financial incentives for low carbon emission electricity generation.


Read the full column, HERE.

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