World Food Clock reveals our vulnerability to warming climate

A new infographic that recently hit the web, called the World Food Clock, is showing us exactly how much food the world consumes, even timed down to the second, and coupled with the draft version of a new climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's really showing us how we're going to be vulnerable in a warmer world.

The World Food Clock itself is a great interactive infographic. It draws from four different reports — State of Food Insecurity in the World and Food Wastage Footprint by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Global Food Report from the Institution for Mechanical Engineers, and the Human Development Report by the United Nations Development Programme — breaking down the numbers and statistics to give a second-by-second look at exactly how much we produce, consume and even waste.

For example, did you know that in just one minute, the world consumes over 7,600 tonnes of food? That's almost 11 million tonnes per day, and nearly 4 billion tonnes a year. Also, did you know that just under one-third of that food goes to waste?

According to the Clock, this waste, over just one minute, costs food producers over 1.4 million US dollars. However, waste during production only accounts for about a third of the total amount that gets tossed.

The 21.6 per cent waste from consumers is a global average. North America and Oceania come in at closer to 40 per cent, Europe is around 35 per cent, and 'Industrialized Asia' comes in at just over 30 per cent. The rest of the world brings the average down.

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So what's the connection between this and the draft IPCC report?

The report, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, is the second part of a three-part climate report (the first of which was out in September 2013) which is due out in its final form at the end of March. It warns (as several other reports have as well) that the warming climate will make it harder to sustain the same food production levels. The 'denier' crowd loves to talk about how having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for plants, but the negative effects — more extreme weather, and more frequent (and worse) flooding and droughts — will far outweigh any possible benefits. This is simply due to the fact that having more carbon dioxide for the plants to breathe isn't worth anything to them if they die from drowning or dehydration.

With production suffering and the overall amount of food being less, this will naturally mean that the total amount of waste will also drop. However, if western society sticks with the general standards it has set for what ends up on its plate (undoubtedly a large part of the current waste), the percentage of waste is set to rise. There's our vulnerability. If we can adapt quickly, we can probably reduce waste so that the shortages aren't that bad, at least until we can mitigate the worst effects of global warming. However, although we can come together on a crisis by crisis basis, adapting quickly to these kinds of long-term effects isn't exactly society's strong point, and there's still a large percentage of the population that doesn't believe there's anything to worry about with global warming and climate change.

Looking back at last week's report about how civilization could be headed for an irreversible collapse due to the excesses of the elites, western civilization does become the elites in this scenario. Food for thought.

(Images courtesy: Getty Images, Whitevinyl Design)

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