Assessing the Impacts of Global Climate Change on Nutrient Availability in Latin America

Global climate change is impacting agricultural production and is projected to have considerably larger impacts in the future. There have been a number of studies assessing potential impacts on food security, but these assessments tend to focus only on changes in production of major grains and oilseeds due to productivity shocks. There has been growing interest in moving beyond a focus on the implications of climate change for agricultural production to an examination of the effects on health and nutrition as well. In addition, there have been several studies providing evidence that increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 results in crops that contain a higher proportion of carbon in their tissues and a reduced proportion of certain key macro- and micronutrients (e.g., Myers et al., 2014; Taub, Miller, and Allen, 2008; Loladze, 2014). This change in plant tissue composition would tend to make foods less nutritious and further contributes to the concerns surrounding nutrition and health effects under future climate projections. A shift towards less nutritious food also potentially contributes to the global double burden of malnutrition, which includes both undernutrition and obesity. In this study, we incorporate both impacts on crop productivity as well as effects of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations on nutrient content to explore the implications of alternative future climate scenarios for nutrient availability. We focus our assessment on Latin America, but include impacts on the rest of the world in order to capture trade effects associated with changes in relative competitiveness of Latin America given changes in productivity experienced across the globe under climate change. We incorporate climate scenarios consistent with the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) representative concentration pathways (RCPs) to explore a range of implications and find substantial impacts on future nutrient availability.