Climate Changes Hinder Crop Yields, Study Finds

Wheat yields in recent years were down by more than 10 percent in Russia and by a few percentage points each in India, France and China compared with what they probably would have been without rising temperatures, according to the study.

Corn yields were off a few percentage points in China, Brazil and France from what would have been expected, said the researchers, whose findings were published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Some countries saw small gains from the temperature increases, however. And in all countries, the extra carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the air acted as a fertilizer that encouraged plant growth, offsetting some of the losses from rising temperatures caused by that same greenhouse gas.

Consequently, the study’s authors found that when the gains in some countries were weighed against the losses in others, the overall global effect of climate change has been small so far: losses of a few percentage points for wheat and corn from what they would have been without climate change. The overall impact on production of rice and soybeans was negligible, with gains in some regions entirely offsetting losses in others.

But the authors of the study — David Lobell and Justin Costa-Roberts of Stanford University, and Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University — pointed out that temperature increases were expected to accelerate in coming decades, making it likely that the challenges to food production will grow in an era when demand is expected to rise sharply.

Over the period covered by the study, 1980 to 2008, temperatures increased briskly in many of the world’s important agricultural regions. A notable exception was the United States: for reasons climate scientists do not fully understand, temperatures in the Midwestern corn and soybean belt during the summer crop-growing season have not increased in recent decades.

“One way to think of it is that we got a pass on the first round of global warming,” Dr. Lobell said.

However, the study found that in virtually all of Europe, large parts of Asia and some parts of Africa and South America, temperatures during the growing season have warmed by an average of several degrees since 1980, increasing the likelihood of extremely hot summer days. The study also looked at rainfall, but changes were relatively minor compared with the temperature increases.

Plants are known to be sensitive to high temperatures, especially if the hot days occur when they are flowering. “In many of these countries, a typical year now is like a very warm year back in 1980,” Dr. Lobell said.

Wheat, rice, corn and soybeans account for the majority of calories consumed by the human race, either directly or as meat from animals raised on grains. Because demand for these grains is inflexible and rising, the losses from climate change probably accounted for price increases of about 6 percent in the four major commodities, the study’s authors found.

At today’s grain prices, that calculation implies that climate change is costing consumers, food companies and livestock producers about $60 billion a year.

“We aren’t talking about the sky falling,” Dr. Lobell said. “But we are talking about billions of dollars of losses. Every little bit of production is valuable when we’re trying to feed the world.”

If the price estimate is correct, it makes climate change a small contributor to a large trend. The prices of many foodstuffs have doubled or tripled in recent years as a result of a host of factors, including rapidly rising food demand in Asia, government mandates to use crops for biofuel production and extreme weather that may or may not be linked to climate change.

The authors of the new study specifically excluded the effects of extreme weather like brief heat waves and flash floods because of limitations in the data that they used. For that and other reasons, Dr. Lobell said, the study’s estimate of the impact of climate change is probably conservative.

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Climate Changes Hinder Crop Yields, Study Finds

Wheat yields in recent years were down by more than 10 percent in Russia and by a few percentage points each in India, France and China compared with what they probably would have been without rising temperatures, according to the study.

Corn yields were off a few percentage points in China, Brazil and France from what would have been expected, said the researchers, whose findings were published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Some countries saw small gains from the temperature increases, however. And in all countries, the extra carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the air acted as a fertilizer that encouraged plant growth, offsetting some of the losses from rising temperatures caused by that same greenhouse gas.

Consequently, the study’s authors found that when the gains in some countries were weighed against the losses in others, the overall global effect of climate change has been small so far: losses of a few percentage points for wheat and corn from what they would have been without climate change. The overall impact on production of rice and soybeans was negligible, with gains in some regions entirely offsetting losses in others.

But the authors of the study — David Lobell and Justin Costa-Roberts of Stanford University, and Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University — pointed out that temperature increases were expected to accelerate in coming decades, making it likely that the challenges to food production will grow in an era when demand is expected to rise sharply.

Over the period covered by the study, 1980 to 2008, temperatures increased briskly in many of the world’s important agricultural regions. A notable exception was the United States: for reasons climate scientists do not fully understand, temperatures in the Midwestern corn and soybean belt during the summer crop-growing season have not increased in recent decades.

“One way to think of it is that we got a pass on the first round of global warming,” Dr. Lobell said.

However, the study found that in virtually all of Europe, large parts of Asia and some parts of Africa and South America, temperatures during the growing season have warmed by an average of several degrees since 1980, increasing the likelihood of extremely hot summer days. The study also looked at rainfall, but changes were relatively minor compared with the temperature increases.

Plants are known to be sensitive to high temperatures, especially if the hot days occur when they are flowering. “In many of these countries, a typical year now is like a very warm year back in 1980,” Dr. Lobell said.

Wheat, rice, corn and soybeans account for the majority of calories consumed by the human race, either directly or as meat from animals raised on grains. Because demand for these grains is inflexible and rising, the losses from climate change probably accounted for price increases of about 6 percent in the four major commodities, the study’s authors found.

At today’s grain prices, that calculation implies that climate change is costing consumers, food companies and livestock producers about $60 billion a year.

“We aren’t talking about the sky falling,” Dr. Lobell said. “But we are talking about billions of dollars of losses. Every little bit of production is valuable when we’re trying to feed the world.”

If the price estimate is correct, it makes climate change a small contributor to a large trend. The prices of many foodstuffs have doubled or tripled in recent years as a result of a host of factors, including rapidly rising food demand in Asia, government mandates to use crops for biofuel production and extreme weather that may or may not be linked to climate change.

The authors of the new study specifically excluded the effects of extreme weather like brief heat waves and flash floods because of limitations in the data that they used. For that and other reasons, Dr. Lobell said, the study’s estimate of the impact of climate change is probably conservative.

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Slow Payers Hinder Trade in Europe

ZARAGOZA, SPAIN — In 2001, an agricultural co-op here was supplying truckloads of wheat to an Italian pasta maker. At first, no one at the Spanish co-op, Arento, was much alarmed when the pasta factory in Milan fell behind in its payments.

The co-op did not cut off the credit until the pasta company owed €1 million, or more than $1.4 million today, never realizing how hard it might be to collect a debt in another country in the European Union. But now, a decade later, having spent years in the courts and tens of thousands of euros on legal bills, Arento has recovered only half of what was owed.

“We came face to face with the Italian legal system,” said Luis Navarro Olivares, Arento’s director general. “The trips to Milan were Kafkaesque. Really, Italy is too far away on a cultural level, a legal level and an administrative level.”

In theory, the European Union is one gigantic economic zone of about 500 million consumers all integrated into the world’s biggest trading bloc. But the ideal is still far ahead of the reality, particularly for businesses that end up trying to collect debts across the Union’s many borders. There are still 27 different national legal systems at work in the bloc, each with its own procedures for handling claims, property attachment and bankruptcies.

European officials say at least €55 billion a year in debt is simply being written off, much of it because businesses find it too daunting to press expensive, confusing lawsuits in foreign countries.

Officials and business leaders say they believe that debt collection problems are a profound deterrent to commerce within the European Union and one of the reasons that job creation and wealth generation falls consistently behind the United States, where pursuing debts across state lines is a comparatively easy task.

With much of Europe still caught in an economic slump and several countries weighing down the bloc’s growth prospects because of huge sovereign debt problems of their own, E.U. officials are starting to circulate proposals for fixing this comparatively simple problem, in hopes of yielding a quick, cost-free stimulus to Europe’s financial health.

Debt collection is just one example of the shortcomings of a market which, for legal, linguistic and cultural issues, rarely functions as a single space. Professional qualifications in one country often are not recognized in another, for example, and local business regulations frequently make it hard for Europeans to set up shop in another E.U. country.

A more effective single market, the Union officials say, could generate €60 billion to €140 billion in additional trade — the equivalent of an additional 0.6 percent to 1.5 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product.

But individual E.U. countries still jealously guard the right to control many regulations covering business, and to operate independent civil and commercial legal systems.

Valle García de Novales, a lawyer here in Zaragoza who specializes in international commerce, tells her clients that any debt of less than €100,000 is not even worth pursuing in court.

“You let it go because it is just too costly,” she said.

What is worse, many companies have been so discouraged that they have given up on doing business across borders. Meanwhile, fewer than 10 percent of European consumers buy anything from a Web site outside their home country.

In an effort to improve the situation, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm in Brussels, is working on a series of proposals to improve the single market. They include 12 priority changes to help reinvigorate the single market, from an agreement to recognize one another’s educational qualifications to an E.U.-wide system for registering patents.

This year, it is expected to propose a standardized Europe-wide system to freeze the amount of money owed to a company in the debtor’s bank account. That would prevent it from being moved to another country — often as easy as a mouse click — while providing an incentive to settle the claim quickly.