The World’s Food Supply Is Under a Quadruple Attack

Carbon dioxide is plant food, so you might think pumping the atmosphere full of it would be better for plants. The trouble is that CO2 is also the world’s most prolific greenhouse gas, trapping heat in a way that creates more problems than it solves for many sensitive plants. This is bad news not only for those plants but for the people who need to eat them.

Heat makes it much harder to effectively grow crops, raise livestock and harvest fish, as detailed in an extensive new report from the United Nations on climate change’s threat to food. The hotter the planet gets, the more strain it puts on agriculture. We’re at growing risk of seeing a grim example of this in just a matter of months as the world’s food supply endures a quadruple attack on its stability.