As a result of climate change, the UK is likely to experience:
•
increasingly
warmer weather: the average annual temperature in the UK is expected to rise by
between 1°C and 5°C by the end of the 21st century
•
warmer,
wetter winters with fewer frosts and cold spells
•
hotter,
drier summers leading to more summer droughts
•
more
extreme weather events such as high summer temperatures and more winter storms
•
sea
level rise: potentially by up to 80cms on parts of the UK coast during this
century.
These
changes will have a drastic effect on agriculture. Cultivable land will be lost
to sea level rises and soils will be degraded due to salination. Extreme weather conditions will encourage
more crop pests, which will produce increased pollution through more pesticide
use. Top soil, our most precious resource, will disappear from deforestation,
floods, landslides and droughts.
As
a result, farming livelihoods will disappear leading to widespread food
insecurity all over the globe.
Above text sourced from OpenLearn under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
2.0 Licence
http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=426512§ion=1.2