Climate change and agriculture: the issues for the environment and food security

Climate change is a global process, of recent origin in its current form, and largely manmade. The dynamic of which it is a part is set to disrupt global agriculture for some considerable time, starting in the next few years. At the same time, agriculture has been identified as one of the major manmade causes of the process. The scheduled exhaustion of fossil fuel resources, population growth and rapid development in certain countries from which demand for energy is high (China, Brazil, India, etc) have resulted in behaviour that serves to exacerbate matters. The emergence of bioenergies as a major new agricultural outlet and the lane appropriation phenomenon are both proof of and exacerbating factors in shortages affecting food security and the environment–and, furthermore, society itself and the main global equilibria–and compound the threats posed by climate change. This is why climate change calls for unprecedented mobilization on the part of the international scientific community.

The main challenge is ensuring food security for the world's poorest people. However, it is important not to restrict the debate to the traditional issues addressed by research for development, nor to be content with simply proposing more efficient production techniques, such as those relating to the green, or doubly green, revolution, in order to achieve ecological intensification. North-South technology transfers and economic support will not only be insufficient, they are also largely irrelevant. In effect, the expected disruption will be truly global, radical and structural, forcing us to look long and hard at the paradigms that govern research for development. CIRAD, with its global network of partners in more than 90 countries, is in a position to take up this challenge.

In this file, the organization presents the approaches taken and the projects with which it is associated, through 14 fact sheets:

• crop adaptation
• plant genetic improvement and agro-biodiversity management
• characterization of environmental services and indicators of ecosystem functioning
• global environmental evaluation of agricultural and food products of tropical origin
• climate change and emerging animal diseases
• climate change and plant health
• adaptation of irrigated cropping systems
• adaptation of agriculture-animal production systems
• animal production and climate change
• biomass energy
• climate change and food security
• payment for environmental services
• climate change and national and local capacity building
• international talks and national climate policy.