1328. Discussions on Climate and Food Issues and the Role of Science and Technology 50 Years Ago

Looking back at Nature articles from 50 years ago, its archive reveals that scientists of the time convened a series of international conferences aimed at developing research strategies to effectively address key issues in the interactions between climate, food, and society. At the time, the world had been experiencing a cooling trend since the first half of the 20th century. However, there was a common consensus among scientists that climate change, rather than temperature change itself, posed a more serious threat to the world's food supply, and discussions focused on the need for science and technology to contribute to solving the worsening climate, food, and social problems.

According to a previous article, around 1975, atmospheric scientists, agricultural scientists, and experts in fields such as economics, international development, law, and political science gathered for a series of international conferences aimed at identifying some of the major problems in the interaction between food and society and developing new research strategies to effectively address these issues.

Participants at these conferences seemed to share concerns that climate change posed a serious threat to the world's food supply in an unstable era of rapidly increasing food demand, dwindling global grain reserves, and many densely populated countries becoming increasingly dependent on a few agriculturally productive regions on the other side of the world for their food supplies.

Meanwhile, the climate in the first half of the 20th century was significantly warmer than the average over the past 1,000 years. The gradual rise in global average temperature during the first half of the 20th century has since declined over the past 25 years, at least at latitudes above 55°N, indicating a cooling trend. There is disagreement among climate scientists about whether this cooling trend will continue, due in part to a lack of understanding of the causes and mechanisms of climate change. Rather than temperature change itself, climate change—particularly the possibility of increased variability in precipitation distribution—was considered a greater concern.

Scientists anticipated the possibility of large-scale regional and global food crises within the next 10 to 20 years due to severe reductions in crop yields and large-scale crop failures caused by droughts and other climate anomalies, and discussed the need for research and policy strategies that could contribute to effective domestic and international responses to emergencies. In particular, agricultural scientists were advised to evaluate the potential impacts of various climate anomalies on various crops, especially new high-yielding varieties, and to consider plant breeding strategies, as well as crop, soil, and water management techniques, that could mitigate the impact of climate stress on agricultural productivity.

The report also called for policymakers to evaluate domestic and international agricultural and food policies, taking into account the possibility that decades of climate stress could lead to severe food shortages affecting vast areas, if not the entire world. While a year of bad weather may not necessarily reduce global food production, it has the potential to disrupt global food trade patterns and drive up food prices. As a result, there were concerns that people in some regions would go hungry not because they lacked food, but because food was too expensive to afford a decent meal.

The archive concludes that, as of 2025, the debate over climate change (rising temperatures) and food issues continues, and that the responsibility for building a framework for effectively applying scientific and technological knowledge to problem-solving rests not only on plant breeders, climatologists, and those promoting artificial rain technology, but also on policymakers.

(References)
NEWS AND VIEWS, August 26, 2025. Scientific meetings debate the effect of climate change on future food production. The threat to global agriculture from climate change gains scientific consensus, and a musing about the reasoning ability of domestic cats in our weekly dip into Nature's archive. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02534-6
https://www.nature.com/articles/256688a0.pdf

Contributor: IIYAMA Miyuki, Information Program