Food Security
Changing precipitation patterns will affect the fertility of land in many regions of the world, but also the United States. Desertification of the Sahel in Africa will cause mass exodus from currently arable lands and worsen the refugee crisis in the area. Similarly, increasing water shortages and severe weather in the United States will decrease agricultural yields and turn our breadbasket into a dust bowl—as happened during the Great Depression, but for a time scale that may last centuries, rather than years. A 2 – 4 degree rise in temperatures in mountain regions is enough to eliminate the snowpack that would otherwise melt and provide water for agricultural land.
