For the 193 national delegations gathering in Copenhagen for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely.
For delegations from low-lying island countries, the principal concern is rising sea level. For countries in southern Europe, climate change means less rainfall and more drought.
For countries of East Asia and the Caribbean, more powerful storms and storm surges are a growing worry.
This climate change conference is about all these things, and many more, but in a very fundamental sense, it is a conference about food security.
We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is raising sea level. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, sea level would rise by 23 feet. Recent projections show that it could rise by up to 6 feet during this century.
The world rice harvest is particularly vulnerable to rising sea level. More >>>
