Adaptation and mitigation of wheat production in the UK to climate change

Climate change has impacts on agricultural production which, coupled with population growth and structural changes, will make sustainably feeding the world extremely challenging. Many regions are expected to face worsening condition, especially areas with already vulnerable food systems. Some world regions might be favoured by moderate climate change impacts but in any case globally the risk for food systems to be affected by unpredictable weather and extreme weather events is increasing, which makes food supply even more volatile and adaptation necessary. This paper uses the examples of the different staple products wheat, meat and dairy to explore climate change issues. It analyses data on current and projected production and demands as well as climate change and how global production can match projected demands. A suite of adaptation-mitigation scenarios is developed and life cycle assessment is used to calculate the emissions from producing and adapting the products to climate change in the United Kingdom. This showed that utilising climate change benefits can, in the case of wheat lead to emission reduction per unit of product. However, favourable climate change impacts are not expected for livestock production and so a comparison of different production systems and technologies is presented with examination of the interactions between climate change impacts on production, appropriate adaptation measures and mitigation options. While large reductions in emissions per unit of product are likely to be possible, the total emissions of food production are expected to increase to 2050 because of growth in demand. These results will be used to discuss the options for servicing increasing global food demand and improving productivity without increasing global greenhouse gas emissions. A consumer-based emissions accounting framework will be used to evaluate the policy and wider implications of these changes.