Roman Zavorotny/Adobe Stock
You’ve probably already noticed that many of the foods in your grocery cart have gone up in price. In the UK, it is the cost of white potatoes It was up 20% in the last yearwith carrots 38 percent more and olive oil rose 40 percent. And while that’s increasing the cost of preparing a roast dinner, specialty items are seeing even bigger increases: you’ll now pay almost double for a few bars of chocolate.
What is driving up prices is complex, but it is one of the biggest factors climate change. In the short term, extreme weather caused by a warming climate has had dire consequences for growers. In northern Europe, for example, rains in the spring of 2024 left fields too wet to harvest vegetables or plant new crops. Meanwhile, a drought in Morocco, which normally exports a lot of vegetables to Europe, meant there was not enough water for irrigation. As a result, the price of potatoes and carrots went up.
As global average temperature It zooms in above 1.5°C Above pre-industrial levels, heat waves, droughts and extreme storms will become even more common and severe in the coming years, causing greater disruption to food production. But current efforts to offset the effects of bad harvests (such as clearing forests to grow more crops) make many other problems worse, biodiversity loss with increasing carbon dioxide levels. With so many foods already heavily impacted, have we underestimated how bad the impact will be? And what can we do if we are faced with it?
