Climate change affects agriculture, the people who practice it, and the people who consume the food it produces through a variety of pathways. Some of these are sketched out in the overview Climate Change and Agriculture: Cause and Impact (make this a hotlink) and in more detail in Water and Adaptation to Climate Change (make this a hotlink). In the technical literature, the impact pathways between climate change and human well-being are often described in a more formal conceptual way, using concepts of vulnerability, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and others. This overview defines these concepts briefly and shows their inter-relationships.
Background
The scientific literature, as consolidated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), demonstrates that the ongoing changes in climate will have a wide range of impacts on human populations that vary in nature and intensity across the world. It has been said that, while warming is global, climate change is local.
Although climate change will have impacts that can be positive for some areas and groups of people, the most significant impacts are expected to be negative. Recent assessments suggest that some effects are advancing more rapidly than predicted by the IPCC, and the impacts can be more severe[1]. Any positive impacts for agriculture, in the form of increased rainfall and longer growing seasons, are expected mostly in the northern hemisphere, affecting the higher latitudes of North America and Eurasia. Areas where lower precipitation, coupled with elevated temperatures, will cause negative changes in water availability in general, and harmful affects on agriculture in particular, include the Mediterranean region, Southern Africa, the Western United States and Northern Mexico, and Brazil.
Moreover some groups within these regions will be more strongly affected than others. In order to design adaptive strategies, it is necessary to assess the regions, systems, and population groups which are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Key concepts
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is defined in different ways by different users. The general definition that has emerged in the climate change literature is the one articulated by the IPCC shown in the box at right. This concept of vulnerability subtends a framework which links human welfare to climate through the key concepts of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. These concepts are defined briefly below.
[1] Turn Down the Heat (make this a hot link)
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