A national climate report has reached startling conclusions about the effects of climate change on air quality, human health, and most importantly, the agriculture and rural communities in the United States.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment, published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, has stated that the country’s food production will decline in regions that have been experiencing an increase in droughts, which has taken place in North Carolina. In addition, higher temperatures due to climate change can intensify wild fires, accelerate the depletion of water and expand the distribution of pests for crops.
The region portion of the report provides evidence of how climate change appears and impacts every state in the country, while the sector portion explores how climate change affects important sectors in the United States, like health and water.
However, according to the report, with increasing climate disruptions like hurricanes and hotter temperatures, the agriculture sector in North Carolina has been majorly affected.
Walt Robinson, a professor at NC State and the interim director of the State Climate Office, stated that the decrease in crop productivity is a very eminent issue for North Carolina, since the state’s economy relies heavily on its crop production.
“In North Carolina, we’ve seen a lot of effects on agriculture from the flooding this fall, particularly with Hurricane Florence,” Robinson said. “Heavy rains are very damaging to farmers, because they can cause the soil to erode and degrade. In addition, crops can get easily damaged in the field if they get too wet, and at the end of the growing season, they cannot be harvested and or end up rotting.”
Robinson also stated that a warmer climate will affect crop growing conditions as well. There is an increasing number of flash droughts, making the essential moisture in the soil evaporate between rain storms.
The 2014 National Climate Assessment supports Robinson’s claims, stating that the annual average precipitation over the U.S. as a whole increased by two inches between 1895 and 2011 and is projected to increase throughout the years. There is also a projected .5 degrees Fahrenheit increase over the next few decades, according to the report.
Bob Patterson, a professor of crop and soil sciences at NC State, said that climate change is the number one topic of conversation today between him and his colleagues.
“The professors at the Crop and Soil Sciences department recognize that climate change exists,” Patterson said, “However, the question becomes how do we address these changes. This is a very high-priority area of research. I’ve been teaching in crop and soil sciences for a long time, and I have found myself spending an increasing amount of time discussing the issue of climate change in my lectures.”
According to Patterson, the Crop and Soil Sciences department at NC State has many researchers and a variety of facilities, including NC State’s very own phytotron, which assists in mitigating this issue.
“Our phytotron is a controlled environment facility that we have on the western part of campus,” Patterson said. “Here, we are able to study the interactive events of climate change and observe the causes and effects of different levels of temperature, water, nutrients and many other factors on crops simultaneously under controlled conditions.”
In addition to the phytotron, many agriculturists at NC State, including Patterson, have been doing more extensive research on plant breeding and genetics in order to decrease the impact of climate change on crop productivity.
“Some people are averse to the use of genetically modified technological approaches, but there has been really great improvement in the approaches being taken with genetic modification,” Patterson said. “There is CRISPR-Cas9, which is a genetic approach that we think the public is more willing to embrace than the older and traditional GMO approaches.”
According to Patterson, the older GMO approach involved taking parts of DNA from a sole organism bacterium and inserting it into the plant.
However, this new technology involves tweaking the genome of the plant itself without introducing genetic material from another organism. Patterson said that the preliminary data on CRISPR-Cas9 suggests that this approach might allow crops to maintain more yield stability.
Robinson stressed that climate change affects individuals’ lives in ways they may not expect, including economically.
“The economic impacts of climate change get stronger and stronger as we go further south, and they are significant on a county-to-county basis,” Robinson said. “A lot of this impact comes from the public health effects of climate change, which is the strain on agricultural workers. Also, a number of diseases that we previously saw as tropical diseases have become more prominent in our region.”
