Climate change threatens crops, water for billions around globe: study
Canadian research is part of an extensive global climate change study that has found billions of the world’s poorest people are at risk.
The results, published Thursday in the journal Science, raise troubling questions about who will be able to adapt in a shifting, less dependable world.
“There’s a great potential for the problems to occur where people have the least ability to cope with it,” said Elena Bennett, who studies ecological systems at McGill University and is one of the paper’s 21 co-authors.
The team considered three ways in which humans depend on nature. Many crops around the world are pollinated through healthy insect and bird populations; shorelines are protected from erosion and storm surges by coral reefs and coastal marshes; and water quality is protected by filtering swamps and wetlands.