Published August 20th, 2010
In the News: Adapting agriculture to climate change
Farming is dependent on the weather. Too little rain can ruin a crop and flooding can destroy fields. Some plants thrive in hot climates and cannot cope with frost, while others are the opposite. Climate is not the same as weather, which is notoriously unpredictable. However the overall weather trends that make climate are changing. Agriculture needs to adapt in order to cope with these changes, and quickly.
Global warming does not just mean everywhere getting gradually hotter, climate is much more complex. Climate change is leading to more rain is some places, less rain in others, storms where previously they were a rarity, hotter summers, and counter-intuitively colder winters.
Agriculture the world over is being affected. While individual countries are experiencing different changes there are some basic changes that need to be made to farming methods worldwide.


