How climate change can be positively impacted through consumer eating habits

Introduction

Food security is quickly becoming a very contentious and combative issue within society. Not only are populations rising at an alarming rate relative to available land capacity, overall family consumption of goods and services is also increasing. In addition, the rise of climate change and its impacts on surrounding communities heavily impacts the ability to nations to provide sustainable food solutions for its constituents. Finally, economic conditions have created adverse circumstances by which producers of food have an incentive to cater to certain market segments while neglecting others. These economic factors combined with climate change have created a circumstance by which overall food sustainability within the world is threatened. This threat has manifested itself over many years and require bold and decisive action to correct. Here, not only should the United Nations take bold action, but individual countries must look to collaborate with one another to improve societal well-being (Alviola, 2013).

Climate change and global warming are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same phenomenon. What are the differences between the two concepts and what leads to the confusion between them?

The primary difference between global warming and climate change is the overall scope of both elements. Here, climate change is much broader and focused on the overall changes of climate over time. These changes include various element outside the scope of planetary warming such as precipitation, temperature, wind patterns, and other climate features. Global warming is heavily focused on the change in global temperature as it relates to human activity and its ability to generate green house gas emissions. A particular focus is to place mandates on emissions that include restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions (Denkenberger, 2015).

These terms are often confused as political and social media discourse often does not make this distinction. Likewise, global warming is a subsegment of the climate change. As a result, both terms are often used interchangeably as they are similar to the general public. This combined with the with the misuse of the terms in general public discourse contributes to the overall confusion related to the terms (Bartfeld, 2003).

According to the Earth and climate science community, if the Earth’s surface temperature rises another 2°C (3.6°F), we will suffer catastrophic weather patterns that, among other things, will raise sea levels, cause widespread droughts and wildfires, result in plant, insect, and animal extinctions, and reduce agricultural productivity throughout the world (Mastroianni, 2015 and Lindsey & Dahlman, 2020). How much credibility do you place in these projections? Why?

Projections are inherently incorrect as they attempt to predict an uncertain future. Many predictions are simply false and incorrect, with numerous examples being seen in industries outside of meteorology. For example, a very common form of projection occurs in the business and economic community. Here, these forecasts often look to project economic elements such as interest rates, GDP growth, or corporate earnings. Inevitably, these projects are often proven incorrect 50% of the time. As a result, these projects amount to no more than a coin flip as it relates to their accuracy of predicting outcomes. The same occurs with other predictive aspects that claim to look far into the future. Weather predictions for example have proven to be very inaccurate 30 days out. However, predictions become much more accurate the shorter the time frame. Here, the same study found that weather forecasts out 14 days where accurate by around 85%. As a result, I personally do not place much credibility to a forecast that is inherently uncertain and will most likely be incorrect. For one, there are too many variables at plant to warrant an accurate prediction. Second, these variables are often interacted to such a degree that makes forecasting the outcome impossible.

Although the credibility of the forecast is in question, the overall impact of green house gas emissions on current society is not. Here, society is currently dealing with the repercussions of both climate change and global warming. These impacts have both society and economic consequences. As noted in the question, global warming has had a societal impact on the sea levels, weather patterns, and other natural occurrences on the planet. The repercussions of such activities are very difficult to enumerate and quantify as they are intangible in nature. Here, society has seen the alarming changes in climate around the world. Society has also seen this manifest in much more dangerous storms, hurricanes, temperatures, and sea levels. As a result, although the predictive model may not be as accurate as previously forecasted, the evidence of the damage being dealt is already upon society. Here, society does not need to rely on the predictability of forecasts and the uncertain future. Instead, they can rely upon the current event occurring in the environment and its ramification for both society and the world at large. Here, the projections may be inaccurate, but the impact from climate change on the society, the economy and food security are already being felt. As a result, the reality facing society should be met with decisive action, while the projections should carry less weight with the overall discourse of society (Holt-Giménez, 2012).

There is no question that the Earth’s food sources are threatened by changes in its weather patterns, but what specific challenges does climate change pose to the food security of people in the developing world?

The first and most obvious challenge will be occurred from an economic perspective. Many countries, particularly third world countries that rely on natural resources to sustain their economy will suffer. We have seen economies that focus heavily on marine and aquatic trade suffer due in part to the adverse weather patterns. For example, warmer temperatures can cause a large number of algae to grow thicker and faster in coastal areas. This abnormal growth of algae has caused an increase in toxicity with the ocean near coastal areas. This toxicity is unnatural to many of the marine life in the area causing many of them to die much more rapidly than otherwise thought. The lack of adequate marine life is therefore having adverse impacts on fisherman, coastal inhabitants, and economies that rely heavily on marine life. In addition, the residual impacts are heavy within the overall food chain as animals that have historically preyed on fish for their own sustenance also begin to dwindle. This example highlights many of the issues related to food security in regions that rely on marine life to generate income, economic development and food for their society (Masante, 2018).

Other countries that are not located near coastal areas must also contend with food security issues. Here, these countries often do not have the infrastructure to support food security within their respective countries. As a result, climate change can exacerbate an already adverse circumstance within a country. Climate change can impact water availability in certain regions of Africa and other land locked nations in the Middle East. As these nations have difficulty accessing already scarce water resources, their ability to farm and generate food internally is hampered. Likewise due to extreme weather events caused by climate change, the ability to properly leverage existing infrastructure is also hampered. For example, many developed countries leverage water passageways to transport very large volumes of grains and other food items. Extreme weather events heavily affect the ability of countries to transport food as there is very little if any alternative to use once an extreme weather event occurs. For example, the 2012 summer drought heavily impacted transcontinental shipping lanes for the midwestern part of the United States (Fraser, 2015). This drought resulted in significant food and economic losses due to reductions in barge traffic, the volume of goods carried, and the number of Americans employed by the tugboat industry (Cottrell, 2019).

U.S. authorities insist that misuse of its assistance is not occurring because it has strict monitoring oversight in place. What is your position on this matter? Is there evidence that financial assistance to developing governments is being widely misused by government officials?

Yes there is evidence of misuse of developing governments around the world. Third world countries have been notorious for corruption and mismanagement of resources. Many examples have occurred in Latin America and in Africa. First many of these countries have misused their currency resulting in rapid inflation and devaluation. This devaluation in countries such as Zimbabwe, Argentina, Haiti, and Cuba have all had an adverse impact on the misuse of financial assistance. First, a devaluation of the currency ultimately undermined the financial assistance provided by other partner countries. Here, the ability to invest and promote proper programs is heavily reduced as financial assistance losses its value within the respective country due to inflation. Likewise, the investments required to provide sustainable food security programs also increase due to inflation and mismanagement of currency. This undermines investment in the country as aid not only losses value over time, but requires every increasing amount of aid in subsequent years.