Efforts to mitigate climate change could unexpectedly increase global hunger levels by making food more expensive. But, if the ozone-reducing benefits of climate action are factored in, it could curb world hunger by a substantial 15%, a new study says.
This ozone-reducing element has been overlooked in most research exploring the climate mitigation impact on food availability—and that’s where the new Nature Food research comes in.
At first, the negative effects of climate mitigation measures on global croplands may seem quite counterintuitive: the researchers dug in to explain them further. They worked with models that simulate the interplay between crop production, trade, prices, and food availability. Then they overlaid this onto six potential future scenarios.
These included a baseline scenario where we continue as we are with business-as-usual until 2050, which would involve no additional measures to curb climate change; and another scenario where specific climate measures like carbon taxes are brought in, in an attempt to curb global warming to 1.5°C by 2050.
The analysis showed that under the 1.5°C target scenario, carbon-reducing climate measures would on the one hand lead to crop increase, due to the beneficial effects of reduced heat stress. This would reduce the population at risk of hunger by 5 million compared to the baseline scenario. Yet on the other hand that benefit would be offset by the effects of the emissions-reducing measures themselves, like carbon pricing. These could spike farmer production costs, land rent, and prices along the food chain. According to the researchers’ models, this could put a deleterious squeeze on food production, reducing supply, and placing 61 million people at risk of hunger by 2050.
But, there’s another element of this climate picture that gets forgotten: if carbon pricing came into full force and carbon emissions began to decline, there would be a parallel dip in ozone-promoting emissions—the likes of methane, nitric oxide, and VOCs. When these ingredients diminish in the atmosphere, the presence of polluting ozone gas also goes down, creating cleaner air, in which crops can grow much better.
In fact, these ozone reductions alone would have the power to reduce the number of hunger-affected people by 8.4 million worldwide. That would offset the damage done by climate mitigation policies by a striking 15%.
Including ozone reductions in the equation doesn’t suddenly solve global hunger, however, which remains a major trade-off of enforcing strict climate policies in the modelling. In fact the authors note that the resulting hunger risk from climate mitigation could still remain higher than that estimated from warming, even with ozone reductions factored in.
In this way, their study highlights the unintended effects of climate action. But by presenting a fuller picture, ozone included, it also identifies opportunities to reduce some of these trade-offs.
A major takeaway is that policymakers could design better climate mitigation approaches with food security in mind. And, countries could take up a myriad of other methods that tackle emissions and shield humans from hunger and at the same time. Technologies that increase farm yields, replacing red meat with more efficient plant-based proteins, and drastically reducing food waste, can all bring the world closer to these twin goals.
Xia, S., Hasegawa, T., Jansakoo, T. et al. “Ozone pollution reduction partially offsets the negative impact of climate change mitigation efforts on global hunger.” Nature Food. 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
