外刊阅读20240415｜再这样下去要吃不起了

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You are already paying more and more for food due to global warming – and rising temperatures will drive food prices a lot higher in the next decade. According to a study done in collaboration with the European Central Bank, by 2035, higher temperatures alone will be pushing up worldwide food prices by between 0.9 and 3.2 per cent every single year. This will add between 0.3 and 1.2 per cent to overall inflation .

Warming-fuelled extreme weather is increasingly affecting food production around the world and if farmers don’t adapt, the losses will become ever more serious as the world continues to heat up . To find out how this is affecting food prices, Kotz and his colleagues compared data on the monthly prices of a range of goods and services in 121 countries between 1996 and 2021, along with the weather conditions those countries were exposed to.

The researchers looked for correlations between food prices and factors such as the average monthly temperature, the temperature variability and measures of drought and extreme rainfall . They found a strong link between the average temperature and the food prices a month or so later.

In regions north of 40 degrees – the latitude of New York City, Madrid and Beijing – warmer-than-average temperatures during winter led to falling food prices. But in summer and at all times in the rest of the world, above-average temperatures increased food prices. What is more, the effects on prices are long-lasting . “Once the prices have increased on the basis of one of these shocks, they stay higher for at least the rest of the year,” says Kotz.