“Climate change fatigue” is a growing problem – it's hard to stay concerned about about the possibility of a meter sea level rise in 80 years time – but the reality is that its impacts are hitting us right here and now - and are already hurting us in our pockets. This year's northern Europe wide drought has hit harvests hard. It's been an "extreme weather event", and while its impossible to say that any one weather event is due to climate change, the predictions are that longer and stronger weather events will become increasingly common.
In East Anglia, my
home, there's a case study happing on my doorstep. The prolonged
drought that has caused a disastrous harvest for many farmers in the area. UK wide yields of cereals was down
1.5% on it's 5 year average despite an almost 4% increase in planting
this year. For farmers in Norfolk and Suffolk crop losses have been
far worse, with some
areas experiencing a 40% fall in yields, while
the region as a whole experienced a 6% fall in wheat and a 22% fall
in barley yields.
The extreme dry weather
continues to be a major problem – with some farmers being forced to
stop harvesting beet because harvesters are having problems extracting the beet cleanly from such dry ground. Now there's another problem caused by this years exceptionally dry weather. The ground is so hard conventional ploughs are struggling to “bite” the soil – and farmers are being forced to spend extra days with powerful subsoilers before ploughing. Yesterday my neighbour had to use three tractors instead of one to prepare a field for sowing – including a massive subsoiler cultivator appropriately named “Sumo”. Drought is a particularly serious issue for food security. Last year harvests in Russia were severely affected by drought – this year the whole of northern Europe has had similar problems.
Falling yields, the
extra work and fuel will drive up food costs – already identified
as
one of the key drivers of inflation in the UK. But this year's
difficult harvest also exposes where the real and immediate dangers
of climate change may lie.
If climate current
climate predictions hold true this year's drought could be come a
more regular feature of life for East Anglian farmers. Dry areas are
likely to get dryer – and there's a fine line between a drought
that causes yield reductions like those experienced in the worst
affected areas this year, a drought that affects the whole of East
Anglia and a drought that causes total crop failure.
Another dry winter in
my area followed by a dry summer could do far more than affect
harvests. If drought stress is severe enough it can cause a “tipping
point” where part or all of the eco-system starts to die-off. This
has happened
twice in the Amazon rain forest over the last 5 years. It doesn't
necessarily take a permanent change in the weather to trigger such an
event – a couple of bad years could be enough to cause widespread
damage from elevated fire risk and die back due to drought stress.
It's these kinds of changes that cause a gradual incremental
deterioration of our environment – and evidence is starting to
emerge that global
warming is starting to have an adverse effect on plant growth world
wide.
So next time climate
change feels like a big yawn, remember – its happening here, its
hurting our pockets and it could hurt parts of our world we really
value, our woodlands, heaths and river systems
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