One big winner in President-elect Donald Trump’s denial of climate change could be Russia.
The Russian government is expected to benefit from record crop harvests in the coming decades as global warming begins transforming once frigid fields into temperate farmland, according to a recent United Nations report.
Vast stretches of Siberia, currently too cold to farm, are expected to warm and unleash new agricultural potential.
American farmers, meanwhile, are forecast to be among the biggest climate-change losers as heat waves ripple across the country destroying crops.
President-elect Donald Trump has said he doesn’t believe in global warming and during the campaign said he plans to overturn progress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Trump appointed Myron Ebell, who is one of the most prominent activists opposed to reducing global warming, to be head of his transition team at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Although he’s since said he’ll keep an open mind on climate science, he reportedly plans on scrapping NASA’s climate research.
Russia is situated in the only region of the world where crop yields are forecast to drastically improve as a result of unchecked climate change, specifically seeing bountiful harvests for cereal crops that include wheat, corn, rice and barley, according to a 2016 U.N. report published in October.
The only other region expected to benefit is Europe, which will experience a slight productivity boost in northern countries.
But yields in Russia will improve as temperatures warm and the growing season becomes longer, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2016 annual report.
“Grain production in the Russian Federation may double, due to a northward shift of agricultural zones,” according to another U.N. study, published a year earlier.
Russia is quite unique in this regard.
Scientists now have ample evidence the world is warming dangerously. It will hurt food production in most countries and lower overall global supplies compared to if the planet remained cooler.
Modeling exactly how global warming will impact weather patterns 35 years from now in various regions of the world is more difficult than identifying the now-clear trend that the planet is heating.
So the exact extent of climate change’s impact on harvests in Russia and other countries is a moving target for scientists. But the 2015 U.N. study Climate Change and Food Systems looked at several different models and concluded that in Russia, “considering more realistic scenarios, with limitations on both temperature and precipitation, the area potentially suitable for agriculture may increase by 64 percent.”
Russia is forecast to become a major cereal exporter by 2050, giving it sweeping international power over other countries struggling to grow enough food for their populations.
By 2050, if global warming continues unabated, heat waves will destroy millions of acres of crops in other countries formerly considered agricultural superpowers.
American farmers are forecast to be big losers in a world of unchecked global warming, according to the models used by the United Nation’s report.
Tim Thomas, an American economist who helped work on the modeling forecasts for the United Nations, estimated that corn yields in places like Iowa, Nebraska and other states will likely decline by more than 30 percent as heat waves scorch the countryside – costing American corn farmers the equivalent of about $15 billion of their 2015 harvest. Currently, America is the world’s largest producer of corn.
The impact of global warming on food production will result in higher rates of malnutrition and hunger in every region of the world – except the former Soviet Union countries that include Russia, according to the 2016 United Nations report. Americans will see the impacts on grocery store shelves, as costs increase on everything from milk to energy bars to fruit juices.
Russia’s shadow lingered over this election. Government experts concluded Russian hackers tried to influence the presidential election by releasing private Democratic Party emails. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham this week called for an investigation into Russia’s election hacking.
Less than a week after being elected, Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin and announced plans to strengthen relations and work together.
Trump denied any connection with Putin during the election, but Russia later boasted about it.
Nathan Halverson can be reached at nhalverson@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @eWords.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.