One of the world's leading medical journals, The Lancet, carried out a major review which concluded that climate changed posed "the biggest global health threat of the 21st century" because of both the direct impacts of extreme weather events and the indirect disruption to the social and ecological systems that sustain us.
More frequent and severe water extremes, including droughts and floods, impact agricultural production, while rising temperatures translate into increased water demand in agriculture sectors.
"We have already observed impacts of climate change on agriculture. We have assessed the amount of climate change we can adapt to. There's a lot we can't adapt to even at 2ºC. At 4ºC the impacts are very high and we cannot adapt to them" - Dr. Rachel Warren, University of East Anglia.
The number of extreme climate-related disasters, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms, has doubled since the early 1990s, with an average of 213 of these events occurring every year during the period of 1990-2016. These harm agricultural productivity contributing to shortfalls in food availability, with knock-on effects causing food price hikes and income losses that reduce people's access to food.
People across 51 countries and territories facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse, requiring immediate emergency action
Risk of extreme weather hitting several major food producing regions of the world at the same time could triple by 2040 (1 in 100 year event to 1 in 30).
A recent study looking at the impact of climate change on food production for the top four maize-exporting countries, which currently account for over 85% of global maize exports, found that "the probability that they have simultaneous production losses greater than 10% in any given year is presently virtually zero, but it increases to 7% under 2°C warming and 86% under 4°C warming "