Agriculture and water resources at risk
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Even if the Paris Agreement is implemented, food and water supplies remain at risk

Report projects impacts of 2015 Paris climate agreement, identifies emissions paths/technology advances needed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

If all pledges made in last December's Paris climate agreement (COP21) to curb greenhouse gases are carried out to the end of the century, then risks still remain for staple crops in major "breadbasket" regions and water supplies upon which most of the world's population depend. That's the conclusion of researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change in the program's signature publication, the "2016 Food, Water, Energy and Climate Outlook," now expanded to address global agricultural and water resource challenges. 

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According to the authors, meeting the 2 C target will require “drastic changes in the global energy mix.” To explore what those changes might entail, MIT Joint Program researchers and contributors from the MIT Energy Initiative and the Energy Innovation Reform Project identify current roadblocks to commercializing key energy technologies and systems, and the breakthroughs needed to make them technically and economically viable.

To project the global environmental impacts of COP21 and model emissions scenarios consistent with the 2 C target, the 2016 Outlook researchers used the MIT Joint Program's Integrated Global Systems Modeling (IGSM) framework, a linked set of computer models designed to simulate the global environmental changes that arise due to human causes, and the latest United Nations estimates of the world's population.

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Source: MIT News

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