{"id":23572,"date":"2025-07-26T12:37:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T12:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/23572\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T12:37:19","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T12:37:19","slug":"weather-extremes-caused-by-climate-change-are-driving-up-food-prices-a-new-report-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/23572\/","title":{"rendered":"Weather Extremes Caused by Climate Change Are Driving Up Food Prices, a New Report Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Extreme weather has stoked food prices around the world in recent years and could lead to more political instability and inflation, with the world\u2019s poor bearing most of the economic pain and health impacts, according to new research.<\/p>\n

A report published Monday<\/a> in the journal Environmental Research Letters tracks 16 weather events, many directly attributed to climate change, including extreme heat and flooding, and connects those to specific price surges.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can see that there\u2019s a broad global context for this happening in recent years that extends all the way from East Asia through Europe and also to North America,\u201d said Maximillian Kotz, a post-doctoral fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the lead author of the study. \u201cWe think our paper is really a call to action for us to consider these wider effects of food price increases in response to climate change for our societies.\u201d<\/p>\n

In California and Arizona, extreme heat and dry soil conditions in the summer of 2022 drove an 80 percent increase in vegetable prices that November. In Spain and Italy, a drought spanning 2022 and 2023 led to a 50 percent spike in olive oil prices by 2024.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chocolate lovers have had to shell out more cash after cocoa prices jumped nearly 300 percent following a 2024 heatwave in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which produce 60 percent of the world\u2019s cocoa. Coffee drinkers were similarly hit after a 2023 drought in Brazil led to a 55 percent jump in arabica bean prices, and a 2024 heat wave in Asia doubled prices of robusta coffee.<\/p>\n

Kotz explained that the research builds on a previous study, done in connection with the European Central Bank and published in 2024, that analyzed how overall consumer prices responded to climatic conditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found is very strong evidence that abnormally high temperatures drive increases in the price of food and overall inflation,\u201d he said, \u201cand that therefore, under future climate change with heat intensifying, we\u2019re going to be expecting to see more and more of these kinds of increases in consumer price indexes, broadly.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the current study, Kotz and his colleagues compared historical weather conditions and identified \u201canything out of the bounds of what we\u2019ve seen before.\u201d They then tracked those out-of-bounds weather events, occurring from 2022 to 2024, to see the impact on food prices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The researchers say weather-related food price spikes could lead to a cascading series of social consequences\u2014nutritonal, economic and political\u2014as people increasingly struggle to pay for food.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As central banks, including the Federal Reserve, try to control inflation, food prices could \u201cchallenge their ability to fulfill their targets for monetary stability,\u201d Kotz said, noting how food prices played a role in last year\u2019s presidential election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Raj Patel, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, said the study\u2019s main warning\u2014that climate change will lead to further price spikes\u2014suggests that \u201cdire social consequences are going to emerge\u201d in the future.<\/p>\n

Historical analyses<\/a> have shown that the 2010 wildfires in Russia forced the price of wheat to skyrocket, directly leading to the Arab Spring uprisings, a series of anti-government protests and violence across much of the Arab world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Patel, who was not involved in the new study, also noted that Russia was undergoing austerity measures when the wildfires were sweeping across its wheat belt, meaning there was less money available to fight the fires. The country then imposed an embargo on wheat exports, sending the global price of wheat \u201csky high,\u201d Patel said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Mozambique, for instance \u2026 we saw bread riots and we saw people taking to the streets because the price of wheat had risen so high that they couldn\u2019t afford daily bread,\u201d Patel explained in a call with reporters. \u201cBut Mozambique itself had undergone austerity, and there wasn\u2019t any money for policing to buy rubber bullets, so the police opened fire with live ammunition. \u2026 Now this is how a heat spike in Russia can cause deaths by live ammunition in Mozambique.\u201d<\/p>\n

Food price spikes have obvious impacts on overall food consumption but can also shift the choices people make. Research by the London-based Food Foundation found that food-insecure households in the United Kingdom cut back on fruit and vegetable consumption when prices go up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a \u201creally big pattern by socioeconomic status, this really strong gradient where the lowest-income households eat the least and the highest-income households eat the most,\u201d said Anna Taylor, the executive director of the foundation and a co-author of the new paper. \u201cThat really, really matters for health because fruits and vegetables \u2026 are massively important for immunity, but also long-term protections from a whole range of chronic conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Currently, about 14 percent of U.K. households are food insecure. The most recent estimation for the United States, from 2023, is about 13.5 percent. Recent cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the U.S.\u2019s primary food assistance effort, will increase the numbers, though many of the reductions won\u2019t take effect for three years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s from 2023, so the number is surely higher now,\u201d Patel said. \u201cGlobally, of course, if you look at who is it that\u2019s going to be worst affected, it is people with the least income and the least power. It\u2019s going to be women and children who are most directly going to experience changes in the affordability of diets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patel referred to the already high number of people considered food insecure, which is estimated to be about 733 million\u2014or about one in 11 globally.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, that figure is going to go up as a direct result of climate change,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tAbout This Story<\/p>\n

Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That\u2019s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.<\/p>\n

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Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.<\/p>\n

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Thank you,<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tGeorgina Gustin\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tReporter, Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

Georgina Gustin covers agriculture for Inside Climate News, and has reported on the intersections of farming, food systems and the environment for much of her journalism career. Her work has won numerous awards, including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and she was twice named the Glenn Cunningham Agricultural Journalist of the Year, once with ICN colleagues. She has worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Conn., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and CQ Roll Call, and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and National Geographic\u2019s The Plate, among others. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Colorado at Boulder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Extreme weather has stoked food prices around the world in recent years and could lead to more political…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,128],"class_list":["post-23572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}