Climate Change May Increase The Area Useful To Grow Cereals

So many catastrophic voices talk about the climate change that we never really hear anything about potential positives. But there are some. Mainly they talk about the fact that normally we should have been in the middle of an ice age and thus we are actually lucky that we caused the climate change.

Plants of a field border in evening sunshine, cereal field in valley of river Lahn near a street in Marburg
By LudwigSebastianMicheler CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

A team from the Memorial University of Newfoundland decided to take the current climate change data and apply them to areas that are currently unusable for agriculture because they are too cold. The scientists found out that the North of Europe and large boreal areas in Russia, Canada, and the USA will benefit from climate change by getting a huge amount of newly usable agricultural land as the north line that currently divides the land that is usable for agriculture would move north by more than a thousand kilometers in average.

And while the authors admit that modeling the effects of climate change is very complicated as there are many many variables. For example, the amount of rainfall would increase but so would the speed of water evaporation. Thus the water balance would change not only geographically but also its timeframe would change. Thus we would lose some areas where we currently produce food and gain others. To eliminate possible faults in their prognosis the scientists decided to use seven different models for their prognosis.

Their conclusion is this: Agriculture will become more important not only in Northern countries like Sweden, Norway or Finland but also in many areas of central Asia. But the largest growth in agricultural land will happen in the Russian Federation in Siberia (5.12 x 1 000 000 km2) then Canada (3.07 x 1 000 000 km2) and the USA in Alaska (0.57 x 1 000 000 km2). In total it should result in about 9.55 x 1 000 000 km2 of new agricultural land.

Sources:

• https://phys.org/news/2018-05-climate-arable.html
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26321-8

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