Options for agriculture at Marrakech climate talks: messages for SBSTA 45 agriculture negotiators

Climate change will affect all four dimensions of food security: availability, access, stability, and utilization of food (Schmidhuber and Tubiello 2007). Food availability from crops, livestock, and fisheries will be affected (Campbell et al. 2016), both through long-term trends in temperature, precipitation, yields, quality and diseases, and through nearer-term increases in climatic variability, meaning more frequent or intense droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, sea surges and other weather extremes. Major knowledge gaps on climate change impacts within non-crop sub-sectors, such as livestock and fisheries, and at the food system or landscape level, for example trade-offs between nutritional and environmental benefits, limit global capacity to ensure food security under progressive climate change (Campbell et al. 2016).