Climate change is increasing the risk to Britain’s food security - Yorkshire Post Letters

The consultation on the government's proposed Land Use Strategy has recently begun. This will deal with optimising land for infrastructure, biodiversity and food security.

Farmers know that food security and their own financial viability is already being increasingly detrimentally affected by climate change. Two years ago, the NFU reported: ‘Climate change is arguably the greatest challenge facing the stability and long-term sustainability of global food production, and British farmers facing increasingly frequent weather extremes. July 2022 was the driest July in England since 1911 and November 2021 to July 2022 were the driest since the seventies. There was only 24 per cent average rainfall in July.’

The weather since has proved to be even more unpredictable. 2023 was the seventh wettest year on record for the UK in the series from 1836. Five of the ten wettest years for the UK since 1836 have occurred in the 21st Century. The unprecedented rainfall in 2023 continued into February and March 2024 preventing the drilling of cereal crops.

In terms of wheat, barley and oilseed rape alone this resulted in a loss of revenue of nearly £890m in 2024 relative to 2023. The 2024 potato harvest was hit by excessive rains leading to widespread rot. It has been considered that the autumn and winter storm rainfall in the UK and Ireland was made about 20 per cent heavier by human-caused climate change.

The government's 2021 UK Food Security Report stated: ‘Climate change poses a risk to UK food production already, and this risk will grow substantially over the next 30 to 60 years. It highlighted the effect of heat stress on livestock due to temperature rise, and fungal disease affecting potato cultivation and other crops due to the increase in heat and humidity. Heat stress in dairy cattle is projected to increase by over 1000 per cent in South West England, the region with the most dairy cattle.

Predictions of this kind, however, do not take into account the inevitable risk of even more chaotic weather conditions which we are seeing increasingly, such as the flooding in Valencia and wild fires in Los Angeles. Perhaps the most concerning is the potential effect of climate tipping points when a sudden change occurs irreversibly accelerating the process. One such tipping point is the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Atlantic current bringing warm waters from the south Atlantic to the north, this feeding into the Gulf Stream. Research shows that the AMOC is already slowing due to melting Greenland ice sheets and Arctic ice. One recent study suggested that the AMOC is more likely than not to collapse by 2050. The result would be catastrophic, dramatically reducing temperatures in northern Europe and creating unprecedented extremes of weather. This threatens agriculture in northern Europe. A study of the effect in Britain suggested that usable arable land could reduce to only 22 per cent of its present area.

Climate change is already putting at risk our food security but the risk is increasing and, in the future, could be disastrous. With mitigation and adaptation, we can reduce that risk.

Farming practices are changing but our farmers must be reassured that their livelihoods are not on the line. Our own eating habits will have to change, but this could have major health benefits. The most important change is that we must reduce the creation of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels with the use of renewables.