Climate change and its impacts dominate our media headlines, and stories of a dystopian future are often accompanied by increasingly horrific imagery. In this case, sadly, the media's dire warnings and predictions for a scarier future have a basis in reality. By all accounts, climate change is hitting the world's population square in the jaw: food and water insecurity.

That extreme weather leading to drought and flooding impacts our food systems is not a new discovery. Farmers have been cursing out Mother Nature for spoiling crops with extreme weather since farming began. Unlike seasonal or random weather events, climate change's curse is its broad-reaching and snowballing power and influence on our weather. When coupled with our own societal needs in terms of resource use, it's easier to understand that climate change is stressing groundwater reservoirs and changing how and where we can farm.

Often thought to be a problem for another nation, climate change-induced food and water insecurity is rapidly becoming a USA concern. According to the USDA, "Climate change is likely to diminish continued progress on global food security through production disruptions that lead to local availability limitations and price increases, interrupted transport conduits, and diminished food safety, among other causes." Its Climate Change, Global Food Security, and U.S. Food System Assessment "represents a consensus of authors and includes contributors from 19 Federal, academic, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental organizations in four countries, identifying climate-change effects on global food security through 2100, and analyzing the United States’ likely connections with that world."

People living in third-world and less developed nations are already struggling through food and water insecurity. Drought has simultaneously robbed them of crop production and water resource opportunities, leading to deaths, health issues, war, and crime. The United Nations has this to say, "In the next 30 years, food supply and food security will be severely threatened if little or no action is taken to address climate change and the food system's vulnerability to climate change."

A recent study published in June by Tom Kompas, Tuong Nhu Che, and R. Quentin Grafton on "Global impacts of heat and water stress on food production and severe insecurity," used the GTAP-DynW model to project "the possible intertemporal impacts of water and heat stress on global food supply and food security to 2050." Their model results found, "(a) substantial declines (...) in global food production of some 6%, 10%, and 14% to 2050 and (b) the number of additional people with severe food insecurity by 2050, correspondingly, increases by 556 million, 935 million, and 1.36 billion compared to the 2020 model baseline."

We know that climate change is a priority issue for protecting the Earth, but studies like the above show that our efforts to combat it are, in fact, self-serving as a means of ensuring future generations' food security.