UN report: Climate change threatens our food supply. Here's how we can fix it

Global warming on land is happening at a rapid rate, and humans will need to change the way they eat and farm to help save the planet, a new United Nations report says.

The report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes a cycle in which the problems of land degradation and climate change exacerbate each other to make land and climate less livable.

"The cycle is accelerating," NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, a report co-author, told The Associated Press. "The threat of climate change affecting people’s food on their dinner table is increasing."

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The review says climate change threatens our food supply "through increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and greater frequency of some extreme events."

The IPCC report, published Thursday and titled "Climate Change and Land," is the latest from scientists around the globe studying climate change and how humans can stop – or contribute to – global temperature increases.

U.N. countries agreed during the Paris climate change conference in 2015 that global temperature increases need to be kept below 2 degrees Centigrade to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change. That 2-degree measure is a conservative estimate,  and countries agreed to strive to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees.

President Donald Trump announced in 2017 his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. 

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"Warming over land has occurred at a faster rate than the global mean, and this has had observable impacts on the land system," the U.N. report authors wrote.

The report focuses on how farming and food production further the problem. The IPCC estimates that 25% to 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from food systems.

Changing the food we eat by switching to healthy and sustainable diets full of grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Meat is identified as "the single food with the greatest impact on the environment" in the report.

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Food waste is identified as a major problem: About a third of all food produced is lost or wasted, according to the report.

The report stresses the need to protect the land, which can  act as a carbon sink and absorb gasses that warm the atmosphere. 

"This additional gift from nature is limited. It’s not going to continue forever," study co-author Louis Verchot, a scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, told The Associated Press. "If we continue to degrade ecosystems, if we continue to convert natural ecosystems, we continue to deforest and we continue to destroy our soils, we’re going to lose this natural subsidy."

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