Locked In

Heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding—all impacts of climate change—are already hitting. While we must do everything we can to stop burning fossil fuels and prevent further damage, communities are already feeling the impacts of warming. We also need to adapt to these changes to give people around the world the best chance of a safe future in the climate-changed world.

I work as a researcher and advisor helping governments, civil society, and international agencies plan for the impacts of climate change. I know that we are not going far or fast enough to protect people and places from the impacts of climate change. My new book, Sink or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate, argues that individuals, communities, businesses, and governments will need to face up to some hard choices to adapt to the impacts coming their way. For example, When should people move away from low-lying coastal areas? What role should the military play in responding to disasters? How do we manage conflict when there isn’t enough water?

All of us, as citizens and also as individuals working in nonprofits, business, philanthropy, governments, and international organizations, need to engage in shaping how we respond to these hard choices to create a livable future for all.

The global food system is a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions and a driver of biodiversity loss. It will also face significant impacts from climate change as rising temperatures shape where and how we can grow crops, storms and floods disrupt supply chains, and droughts hit multiple growing regions at the same time. The following excerpt imagines what the food system could look like in 2070. The scenarios show how the future is in our hands, and even when the going gets tough, we can fight for the future the world so desperately needs.—Susannah Fisher

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Imagine it is 2070.

The world continues as usual with a few tweaks here and there. As temperatures heat up, swathes of agricultural land in Africa and South Asia stop producing sizeable harvests. There is hardly enough water for irrigation systems, and rainfall is unpredictable. Hundreds of millions of people cannot get enough nutritious food and humanitarian organizations are providing food rations most years. A few farmers are experimenting with new heat-resistant crops, but so far the harvests are small and no one locally wants to buy it. Many migrate to local cities but food prices are at an all-time high as so little is available locally. At the same time, Canada and Russia have started making huge profits from crops grown on their new agricultural land by selling to the humanitarian agencies when prices are highest.

The same year there is massive crop failure across the global breadbaskets. Several countries stop all exports, leaving others with no wheat or maize. The US continues to export to its powerful allies, but the smaller countries get nothing. The rich continue to eat beef through the autumn while other countries face rioting on the streets due to soaring bread prices and lack of staples in the shops. Caribbean countries call the United States government, pleading for grain, but protectionism wins the day.

Tuna has moved out of the exclusive economic zones around the Pacific islands and into the high seas, and the distant-water fishing nations are making large amounts of money while the Pacific nations have lost a major source of income. Anger and resentment are growing at what they see as the theft of their fish by the ‘carbon nations’, and there is a gap in local diets and higher levels of hunger. Some fishers have tried to set up aquaculture but the costs are higher and the fish less nutritious.

Or imagine this.

There has been a catastrophic drought across several breadbaskets and the wheat and maize crop for the year has been decimated. There are global shortages. The Food Systems Stability Board saw this coming and swings into action to ensure countries who need it can access wheat or a replacement grain at a reasonable price, allocating each country what they need. Since 2025, new grain varieties have been developed that grow in slightly different conditions and some of these are used to fill the gaps. Global publicity campaigns are promoting the new crops and celebrity chefs in each country have developed daring recipes and cooking challenges to get people on board.

A new regulation model has built more redundancy and resilience into the global food system. The global agri-food businesses are required to produce and transport a variety of crops across their portfolio and to demonstrate to the Food Systems Stability Board how they would be able to continue to provide supplies in a variety of different scenarios. Governments are also encouraged to target a variety of crops in their national food plans and to build strong trade relationships with countries whose climate risks seem to be negatively correlated. The new agricultural land emerging at higher latitudes is subject to international tax and regulations depending on the historical emissions of the country in question. Historical high emitters lease most of the land back to countries that have moved out of the safe zone. They also commit high amounts to reforestation and biodiversity.

Farmers across Africa and South Asia are feeling the pinch of another year with declining yields and crops that can no longer withstand the extreme heat. The health of farm workers is poor in the summer months. Many farmers have already moved away, supported by the migration support schemes. Governments whose land has moved out of the safe climatic space have received the largest payouts so far from the fossil fuel companies through pursuing their case in the courts. They use the funds to retrain farmers in new technologies to develop alternative proteins or make large-scale investments in new food systems, trialing new crops and local markets. The bad year has meant nutrients are really low in many major crops. Children’s diets are supplemented with additional food sources and fortified grains through widespread social protection schemes and cash transfers paid for by the payouts.

As fish and animal species move towards the poles and high seas, a unique ownership model and licensing system means the inhabitants of countries where the fshing grounds were previously retain their rights to manage the stocks in new locations and continue to generate revenue under the justicebased fisheries scheme.

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These alternative futures highlight the stark choices facing the global food system. The impacts of climate change will affect where and how food is produced, where animals and fish can survive and how food is moved around the world. It will exacerbate existing inequalities and is the ultimate demonstration of the huge injustices of climate change. Countries along the tropics that had no substantive role in causing climate change could be facing the loss of their growing lands for agriculture and their wild animal and fsh populations could move on with no new ones expected to move in. There are, then, several hard choices on the horizon.

Hard choice 1—Who has the right to the moving fish?
The countries who have had least responsibility for climate change are in many cases the ones losing their fisheries. In many cases no replacement species will move in. Current management approaches entitle the fish to the coastal countries in the new locations. But this does not seem fair. One option is countries that had access to the fish populations before climate change could keep those rights and sell them to others through a license scheme like those we already see in the Pacific. Or people could travel beyond their national waters to follow their catch. But countries further along the coast or those fishing in the high seas would need the incentives to agree or international pressure and support to do so. Resolving this hard choice needs new agreements between countries but also an international consensus on what a fair approach looks like to these climate-related shifts.

Hard choice 2—Who bears the costs and benefits of the shifting zone for agriculture?
As the areas that can grow food shift, many people could lose their livelihoods. Many will migrate if they can, or try growing new resilient crop varieties, but others will be stuck owning land that has lost much of its value unless it can be repurposed for something new. There are limits to adaptation in one place, and it will be a hard choice for farmers, governments and international investors to decide at what point the productivity of the land is too low to continue, and how individuals or firms can be helped to transition to opportunities in new places. National and international support will be needed to make sure people and places do not get caught in a negative spiral as climate risks are priced into investment plans and money dries up. Do the countries without historical responsibility for the climate crisis deserve compensation for the loss of the agricultural land? And what about the new frontiers of land that open up? Using these for agriculture may help food security but this needs to be done in a way that protects biodiversity and does not increase emissions. These will be national decisions made within different jurisdictions but will have global consequences. We will need global norms and agreements to ensure states take on their fair share of responsibility for protecting nature and absorbing carbon.

Hard choice 3—How do we balance food diversity with productivity?
We will need to balance the diversity of what food we produce with productivity across the food system to make sure there is both enough resilience to withstand shocks and also enough food to feed a growing global population. The food system is especially vulnerable to climate change as there is so little diversity within it. Huge quantities of staple crops are grown in a few areas of the world and limited varieties dominate global consumption. The agri-food companies encourage a highly effcient and unified system based on a small number of fertilizers, seeds and crops that are part of long supply chains embedded in financial systems. A diverse system is more resilient but there are hard choices ahead in order to build this, and possible trade-offs with efficiency and productivity. Governments will need to invest in or subsidize more diverse food varieties and support local food systems at the same time as creating the incentives for global food producers to diversify their networks. This would have a higher cost in the short term but have longer-term benefits.

Hard choice 4—How can we manage global trade to ensure everyone has enough food?
We face hard adaptation choices around how the food system and trade flows can meet global needs even when multiple shocks hit around the world like a multiple breadbasket failure. On the one hand, each country wants to protect its own population in times of shortage. On the other, if every country acts only in its short-term self-interest, some will simply not get enough or the prices will be too high. This will have wider implications for global security, as rising food prices will lead to unrest and instability. Countries with power in the current food and trade system need to be incentivized to take into account the longer-term benefits of sharing limited resources in times of crisis, while being assured they will have enough for their own population. This will require them to cede some control of supply chains for the greater good. We need to use the existing multilateral institutions to catalyze greater action and find the balance between inclusion and decision-making power and efficiency. Solutions and ideas exist, but we need to create the incentives for change and use levers such as regulation to adapt to these impacts. In some cases, this is going against an established and entrenched political economy and set of powerful actors and will need concerted political effort.

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Not all shifts in a system will be planned government or international responses. The food system is decentralized, with many different players. In some cases technologies may suddenly shift the goalposts of the food system. In others, agri-food businesses and investors will recognize the need to protect their supply chains as costs escalate and will build adaptation and redundancy into their networks. In these situations it will be important to make sure these shifts are really adapting to the future impacts of climate change, and not just transferring the problem to another area or a few years down the line. It will also be important to ask who has been included or excluded in these shifts, and what role governments or the international community have to play in protecting those left behind.