Feeding a Climate-Changed World

Climate change and global food securers are inextricably linked. The global food system—including agriculture and land-use change—accounts for roughly one-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, making it a significant driver of climate change. Paradoxically, this system is also highly vulnerable to the impacts of a warming climate. Rising temperatures disrupt hydrological cycles, weather patterns, and soil health essential for crop production. Under high-emissions scenarios, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that agricultural yields could decline by 10 to 25 percent by 2050, as severe droughts, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires become more frequent. Such declines would exacerbate global food insecurity—already, on the order of 750 million people faced hunger in 2023—and threaten the livelihoods of the 1.5 billion individuals who grow, harvest, process, and distribute the world’s food. Currently, about half of the global population lives in households connected to agrifood systems, so disruptions to these systems, which encompass everything from agricultural production and processing to distribution, consumption, and waste management, can have widespread socioeconomic ramifications. 

To grapple with this conundrum at the nexus of climate and food, Perry World House convened a high-level conference, “Feeding a Climate-Changed World,” on March 18, 2025. This conference brought together policymakers, practitioners, and academics from world-renowned institutions and diverse national contexts to develop policy insights and research solutions to these multifaceted challenges. Through a series of focused panel discussions, participants examined critical questions, including: How can we produce more food with less environmental impact? Is there a diet that is healthy for both people and the planet? And how might geopolitical dynamics shape food security in a warmer, more urbanized world? 

This conference was made possible by a generous grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.