Perry World House Hosts “Feeding a Climate-Changed World” Conference
The global food system, including the conversion of land used for agriculture, accounts for 34 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making it a significant driver of climate change. Paradoxically, this system is also highly vulnerable to global warming. This is because rising temperatures disturb factors like hydrological cycles, meteorological phenomena, and soil health that are critical to food production. According to the IPCC, under high emissions pathways, where severe droughts, fires, floods, and heatwaves are predicted to be more common, agricultural yields could decline between 10 and 25 percent by 2050. This will not only worsen food security globally (some 750 million faced hunger in 2023) but also seriously impact the socio-economic stability of the 1.5 billion people that grow, harvest, process, and distribute food. Currently, about half of the global population lives in households linked to the agrifood system.
In the decades to come, policymakers will find themselves in a climate-driven conundrum to be further complicated by the other mega trends of rapid urbanization and population growth. By 2050, the world is expected to host an additional two billion people, with seven out of every ten likely to live in cities. The FAO estimates that to meet needs, countries will need to produce 50 percent more food by 2050. Decision makers must figure out how to produce more food, for more people under increasingly uncertain, if not inhospitable, conditions. At the same time, they must also reduce the carbon intensity of the agri-food complex in order to reign in the threat climate change poses to it. Failure to achieve these goals could seriously undermine security on many fronts.
With research agendas on climate change, democracy, human rights and security, Perry World House convened a high-level workshop on March 18, 2025, to develop policy innovations and research solutions to this multidisciplinary dilemma. Featuring policymakers, practitioners and academics from world-renowned institutions and representing a variety of countries and contexts, the discussions explored solutions to critical questions such as: how to produce more food with less environmental impact; whether a diet can be healthy for both planet and people; and how geopolitics might shape food security in a warmer, more urban, and populated world. The conference discourse highlighted how needs might change in the coming decades as well as many innovations, for instance in plant breeding, livestock management and regenerative farming that will help meet food demand. Participants also took a deep dive into the nexus of climate change, urbanization, and nutrition, discussing how diets are changing and what policies various countries are putting in place, to assure nutritional and overall food security.
Dr. Andrew Hoffman, Gilbert S. Kahn Dean of Veterinary Medicine, delivering the conference’s opening keynote.
Perry World House Distinguished Visiting Fellow H.E. Khadeeja Naseem, Senior Advisor of the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group and former Maldives’ Minister of State for Climate Change, providing an overview of how climate change impacts food security.
Dr. Zhengxia Dou, Professor of Agricultural Systems at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, speaking on a panel on mitigating the effects of food production and consumption on climate change.
H.E. Jose Luis Chicoma, Program Chair of The Future of Food: Power and Biodiversity at The New Institute and former Minister of Production of Peru discussing how urbanization and global warming shape dietary patterns and nutrition around the world.
The conference wrapped with a panel on geopolitics of food security and climate change.