Journal article
Climate change as a driver of food insecurity in the 2007 Lesotho-South Africa drought
- Abstract:
- Climate-induced food production shocks, like droughts, can cause food shortages and price spikes, leading to food insecurity. In 2007, a synchronous crop failure in Lesotho and South Africa—Lesotho’s sole trading partner—led to a period of severe food insecurity in Lesotho. Here, we use extreme event attribution to assess the role of climate change in exacerbating this drought, going on to evaluate sensitivity of synchronous crop failures to climate change and its implications for food security in Lesotho. Climate change was found to be a critical driver that led to the 2007 crisis in Lesotho, aggravating an ongoing decline in food production in the country. We show how a fragile agricultural system in combination with a large trade-dependency on a climatically connected trading partner can lead to a nonlinear response to climate change, which is essential information for building a climate-resilient food-supply system now and in the future.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 2.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-021-83375-x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Article number:
- 3852
- Publication date:
- 2021-02-16
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-01-28
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2045-2322
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1162200
- Local pid:
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pubs:1162200
- Deposit date:
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2021-02-25
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Verschuur, J et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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