RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Climate change and the increasing amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere could cut down on the amount of nutrients such as protein, iron and zinc that plants need, thus putting at risk anticipated increases in the global food supply, say researchers at RTI International and colleagues.

In a new study, the RTI team along with partners at other institutions found that nutrients could be reduced:

  • Protein by 19.5 percent
  • Iron by 14.4 percent
  • Zinc by 14.6 percent

The reductions are likely to take place over the next three decades, the researchers conclude.

A result would be that expected increases in crop yields through technology and market adjustments would be “substantially diminished by the negative impacts of climate change on the availability of nutrients in crops,” RTI says.

“We’ve made a lot of progress reducing undernutrition around the world recently but global population growth over the next 30 years will require increasing the production of foods that provide sufficient nutrients,” said study co-author Timothy Sulser, who is senior scientist at the International Food Policy Research Institute

“These findings suggest that climate change could slow progress on improvements in global nutrition by simply making key nutrients less available than they would be without it.”

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The study was published July 17 in the journal Lancet Planetary Health.

“[W]heat, rice, maize, barley, potatoes, soybeans and vegetables are all projected to suffer nutrient losses of about 3 percent on average by 2050 due to elevated CO2 concentration,” RTI adds.

And the effects of climate change would not be spread evenly, the study warns.

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“In general, people in low- and middle-income countries receive a larger portion of their nutrients from plant-based sources, which tend to have lower bioavailability than animal-based sources,” said Robert Beach, PhD, senior economist and fellow at RTI and lead author of the study.

The researchers relied on estimated changes in the productivity of agricultural commodities, data from the Global Expanded Nutrient Support (GENuS) model, and two data sets on the effects of CO2 on nutrient content to create a global economic model for use in the study.

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