The increasing amount of material available on the Internet reflects a recognition that the impacts of climate change on agriculture and food security could be significant, both within the United States and internationally. Those wishing a quick summary of the issues would do well to read the fact sheet on the UNFCCC web site. More detailed descriptions of the linkages can be found at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization web sites. A full length paper by agronomists Cynthia Rosenzweig and Daniel Hillel, published in Consequences, describes all agriculture-climate change interlinkages, from sea-level rise to agriculture's own contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. This is must reading for those wishing to get up to speed on the issues.

Two recent global assessments, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) Global Agro-Ecological Assessment, make important contributions to our understanding of the issues. The report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability of the IPCC Third Assessment addresses climate change impacts on agriculture and food security. See section 3.2 of the summary for policy makers, or section 4.2 of the technical summary. The report on Mitigation addresses the potential of the agricultural sector to help mitigate climate change through soil carbon sequestration. See page 8 of the summary for policymakers and section 3.3.4 of the technical summary. The IIASA report provides a summary of the methodology and results of a comprehensive global assessment of the world’s agricultural ecology. Pages 21-28 specifically address climate change impacts on food production.

Several sites address U.S. agricultural adaptations. A good overview paper is the Pew Charitable Trusts' Agriculture and Global Climate Change web site, and a report on the major uncertainties related to climate variability and crop damage due to weeds, insects and diseases is available at the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment web site. For an exploration of the politics involved, a good recent overview is provided on the Global Change Electronic Edition web site. An extensive assessment process was conducted for the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability. The report on the impacts of climate change on U.S. agriculture is available at the Global Change Research Information Office web site, and the process followed to arrive at that report is detailed at the Global Change Research Program web site. Furthermore, the USDA's Global Change Program has assessed the economic consequences to U.S. agriculture of the agreements reached in the Kyoto Protocol.

There are relatively few sites that address impacts in other parts of the world. Short summaries of climate change's impacts on food and fiber production in different regions are embedded in a larger IPCC regional vulnerability assessment. Extensive search yielded only two on-line resources addressing developing country concerns: a chapter on vulnerability to climate change among subsistence farmers on Environmental Development Action's site and a paper by agricultural economists at the University of California at Berkeley on economic impacts.

For more on the crop-climate modeling study featured on this web site, an ariticle entitled "Climate Change and World Food Supply" by Cynthia Rosenzweig et al. provides important background and findings from the original EPA-funded study. A more recent summary, including map graphics of outputs, is on the United Kingdom Meteorological Office's site. Summaries of related crop-climate modeling can be found at the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Environmental and Societal Impacts Group's web site.

For an on-line bibliography of climate change impacts on agriculture, visit the Pacific Institute's Bibliography on Environmental Change and its Impact on Species/Ecosystems and enter "agriculture" as a search term.