Climate warming increases food prices

A recent study showed that climate warming and heat waves will lead to a greater rise in food prices in the coming years, and the countries of the South will be most affected by it.
The effect varies according to seasons and regions. However, the expected rise in temperatures in 2035 will lead to an increase in food prices at a rate of 1.49 percentage points annually in the best scenario, according to calculations by the authors of the study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, affiliated with Springer Nature.
In the worst-case scenario, the increase would be 1.79 percentage points, and the impact on overall inflation would be 0.76 and 0.91 percentage points, respectively.
Maximilian Kutz, co-author of the study, explained that by comparing historical prices and weather data from 121 countries between 1991 and 2020, “we found strong evidence that high temperatures, especially in summer and in hot regions, cause increases in food prices.”
Researchers from the University of Potsdam and the European Central Bank then extrapolated this data based on future climate conditions expected between 2035 and 2060.
Maximilian Kutz said that these expected conditions “are likely to lead to increases in food price inflation and overall inflation around the world, especially in already warmer regions, such as the Southern Hemisphere.”
Africa and South America will be the two continents most affected.
Kutz pointed out that rising temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere will lead to higher prices, “especially in the summer.”
However, researchers did not find a significant effect of warming on other components of household expenditures, except for electricity prices.
Maximilian Kutz pointed out that this is “fully consistent” with studies showing that “agriculture is particularly sensitive to climate impacts.”
The study's authors also focused more specifically on the impact of the heat wave in Europe in the summer of 2022, which likely caused food price inflation to rise by 0.67 percentage points, with a greater impact in southern Europe.
The study confirms that “climate change will increase the scale of these extreme weather events, and thus their potential impact on inflation.”