COVID-19 Pandemic, Climate Change, and Conflicts on Agriculture

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This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su15108280

Global food security is a worldwide concern. Food insecurity is a significant threat to poverty and hunger eradication goals. Agriculture is one of the focal points in the global policy agenda. Increases in agricultural productivity through the incorporation of technological advances or expansion of cultivable land areas have been pushed forward. However, production growth has slowed in many parts of the world due to various endemic challenges, such as decreased investment in agricultural research, lack of infrastructure in rural areas, and increasing water scarcity. Climate change adversities in agriculture and food security are increasing. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected global food supply chains. Economic and social instability from the pandemic contribute to long-term disturbances. Additionally, conflicts such as war directly affect agriculture by environmental degradation, violence, and breaches of national and international trade agreements. A combination of food security and climate change challenges along with increased conflicts among nations and post-COVID-19 social and economic issues bring bigger and more serious threats to agriculture.

agriculture pandemic climate change global food security

1. Introduction

Food security is commonly understood as the availability of food in the household or the community, or on national and global levels ^[1]. The World Food Summit of 1996 stated that “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet dietary needs for a productive and healthy life” ^[2]. Food insecurity has many negative consequences on the health, nutritional status, and behavior of both children ^[3] and adults ^[4]^[5]. One of the joint reports from the FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and the WHO reported that 702–828 million people faced acute food insecurity in 2021, almost 150 million more than in the pre-pandemic period ^[6]. In the context of the US, a report from USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) showed that around 14.3% of American households are food insecure, and 5.6% of these can be classed as highly food insecure households ^[7]. In the current scenario of increasing population growth and the increasing average life span of individuals, producing more food to ensure food security is a necessary condition in order to combat both poverty and hunger. Given the inextricable tie of food to agriculture, an increase in productivity and growth of the agriculture sector as well as sustainable expansion at the global level through cutting-edge advancements is essential in this context ^[8].

Agriculture is the major source for food and many livelihoods, and it is one of the major components that can enable the mitigation of both poverty and food insecurity issues. However, agriculture alone cannot fill the gaps related to food insecurity, but, rather, needs simultaneous institutional and industrial development ^[9]. Still, without addressing ways to increase agricultural production efficiency and outcome, food security cannot be achieved at a global scale. Improvements in agriculture can help farmers enhance or maximize outcomes at the same level of resources by increasing productivity ^[9]. Achieving sustainable global food security requires the combined integrated efforts on physical, social, economic, political, health, nutritional, and environmental levels as well as adequate policies and trade balance, both nationally and globally ^[10]. Therefore, addressing global food security with a sustainable approach is a multi-faceted issue. Among many factors, there are a few major issues around the world that need to be central concerns of nations. In the current context, these issues include the interface of pandemic issues and post-pandemic situations, climate change, and related conflicts that directly affect food and agricultural systems. Without a consensus on these issues, purposeful policy actions and their effective implementation seem daunting, and make the challenge to end hunger seem unachievable.

2. Conceptual Framework of Interrelation between Pandemics, Climate Change, and Conflicts

Usually, pandemics, because of the risk of negative health consequences and even death, create restrictions in the work system, limiting the operation of agriculture, industries, trade, and business, inevitably causing a plateau (or decline) in economic growth. Threats from pandemics are multidimensional and interconnected. From the social perspective, to a certain extent, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our behavior, social attitudes, and lifestyles, such as working from home, fewer face-to-face interactions, etc. ^[11]. It has also slowed the responses of different countries that were acting against environmental issues, threatening our ability to respond to climate change in time, including delays in international negotiations for biological diversity, weakened climate policies, interruption of environment-related scientific research, the higher use of plastic-made consumables like gloves and masks as well as plexiglass and other disposable plastic items, and increasing litter resulting from such disposables in the big cities ^[12]. It has been reported that greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions and air pollutants have been lower during the pandemic due to less demand for global energy use, such as flying, driving, etc. However, these results are temporary with short-term outcomes that will not have a significant impact on the overall reduction in GHGs. Instead, more negative and long-term impacts on climate change are expected because of negative secondary effects and their interactions ^[13], and, moreover, saving energy is negatively counterbalanced by the behavioral and systemic responses to the preventative measures during the pandemic, such as depression and other mental health problems. Moreover, the reduction of GHG emissions and pollutants during the pandemic was counterbalanced by the “rebound effect” ^[11], where emissions and pollutants increase during the rebuilding period when life starts to return to normal in order to make up for lost time and save the economy. These anthropogenic activities could well exacerbate climate change in the long run. Although pandemics do not have a decisive effect on existing conflicts or the evolution of new ones, they can have some transformative effects on international politics due to changing social and economic dynamics ^[14]. This effect could worsen the pre-existing conflicts among nations or spark the emergence of new ones.

Climate change is one of the most challenging environmental issues of the twenty-first century. The US National Climate Assessment in 2018 noted that the climate on earth is changing more rapidly than at any point in modern history because of human-related activities ^[15]. Climate change generally includes shifts in weather patterns, changes in long-term patterns or average weather parameters, and the occurrence of unexpected extreme environmental events that are primarily due to greenhouse gas emissions ^[16]. Interactions between these changes and COVID-19 have also been studied, and it has been found that high temperatures combined with high humidity might suppress COVID-19, causing virus transmission and seasonal patterns alternating between the northern and southern hemisphere, which have, indeed, shown differences in COVID-19 transmission ^[17]. Due to the impact of climate change on various weather parameters such as precipitation, temperature, and humidity, which are directly or indirectly proportional to virus transmission, it could complicate the pandemic and post-pandemic situation by creating an environment for the future spread of such diseases. Furthermore, climate change can reshape the geographic range in which certain animals live, especially in the tropical regions, which harbor many types of infectious diseases, and this adds adversity to conditions that are already often precarious ^[18].

Some studies have reported that climate change could drive the risk of violent conflicts, although this finding is highly contested among researchers. It has been estimated that about 3–20% of conflicts over the past century are somehow associated with climate change. Mach et al. (2019) suggested that an increase in global temperature by approximately 2 °C is estimated to increase conflict-related risks by 13%. The reduced opportunities produced by responses to a pandemic can increase violence (in other words, people whose livelihoods are affected may find violence to be an alternative), and the decrease in agricultural productivity, the increased price of commodities, and uneven socioeconomic development are just some of the other mechanisms by which climate change could increase the risk of conflict ^[19]. Indeed, warming caused by climate change is one of the factors influencing the risk of civil war in countries in Africa due to the socio-economic effects of disrupted climate patterns ^[20].

Conflict can simply be defined as a disagreement due to actual or perceived opposition of needs, values, and interests ^[21]. International conflict can be referred to as the conflicts between nations around the world or between people and organizations of different countries ^[22]. Conflicts among nations, especially violent conflicts and outright wars, undermine systems and devastate the economy, social balance, developmental plans, and policies. Imbalances in these contexts could impact climate change. For instance, the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine could change mitigation policies as territorial and political decisions override climate ones, and they could also detrimentally affect the proper execution of existing climate policies due to the limited supply of global energy transition given that both of these countries are big manufacturers of the supplies needed for green technologies, which include solar panels, electric vehicle batteries, and wind turbines ^[23]. Moreover, conflicts might have negative effects on the pandemic situation, too. Social and economic instability that result from conflict between nations provide shocks that oblige people to migrate from one place or country to another. This migration further complicates pandemic mitigation efforts due to the logistics and pressures of migrating populations, which can only yield a variety of complications and difficulties. Conflicts also create distress to people as they cause death and long-term injuries in families and communities, and they can also cause resource crises due to draining resources such as food and medicine. Due to these reasons, people are forced to migrate ^[24], and due to larger contact among people or crowds from the flow of people during migration, this could increase the transmission of disease, adversely affecting recovery efforts during pandemic, and detrimentally impacting the health of migrants ^[25]. Figure 1 provides a summary and outline of the linkage and interrelation between a pandemic, climate change, and conflicts.

Figure 1. Conceptual framework of interrelation between climate change, pandemics, and conflicts.

References

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Subjects: Agricultural Economics & Policy

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Devendra Paudel

Ram Chandra Neupane

Sailesh Sigdel

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Aditya R. Khanal

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1. Introduction

2. Conceptual Framework of Interrelation between Pandemics, Climate Change, and Conflicts

References