In China, Drastic Rise in Crop Pests and Diseases Due to Climate Change
The amount of farmland hit by crop pests and diseases in China has quadrupled in the past 50 years, according to a recent study. Climate change was found to be responsible for more than a fifth of this change – an ominous warning for the agricultural industry in a warming world, writes Lily Hess at Landscape News.
China is the world’s largest producer of rice and wheat and the second largest producer of maize. A rapidly warming planet, however, could threaten the future of the food supply needed by its population – which is roughly a fifth of the world’s population – due to rising crop pest and disease outbreaks.
“I read a few surveys a few years ago. When they asked farmers their perception of climate change, the first item coming out is that they are feeling a change in crop pests and diseases,” says Xuhui Wang, an assistant professor at Peking University and an author of the report. “This aspect, however, is largely dismissed in the literature, and the understanding of the relationship between crop pest and disease occurrence and climate variability is largely uncertain. So our knowledge of this is pretty limited.”
Using a database of more than 5,500 statistical records dating back to 1970, the researchers calculated that the total proportion of cropland suffering from pest or disease outbreaks shot up from 53 percent in 1970 to 218 percent in 2016. A single area can suffer from pest or disease outbreaks multiple times in a year, so this number can exceed 100 percent. (In other words, if these outbreaks were to theoretically affect all Chinese farmland equally, every hectare of land would have been invaded by pests or diseases more than twice in 2016.)
This figure doubles to 460 percent by the end of the century under the worst-case climate scenario envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in which the planet warms by roughly 4.4 degrees Celsius from pre-Industrial levels. Such a future would see a nearly 3 percent year-on-year increase in the amount of land affected by crop pest and disease outbreaks.
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