Core Idea
Climate change and food security are not competing tragedies.
This is true even though rising temperatures stress crops, extreme weather devastates harvests, and shifting rainfall patterns can wipe out entire growing seasons.
The environmental movement has focused exclusively on these genuine risks. It’s why we get ‘just stop oil’ and its variants.
What this misses is the reality that when people are cold and hungry, they will burn anything to keep warm and eat anything to stay alive.
The mindful sceptic lesson is this.
Seven hundred million people are undernourished today, not in some future scenario. A billion more live one bad harvest away from malnutrition. Meanwhile, we produce enough food to feed everyone well, but waste a third of it because supply chains are optimised for profit, not resilience.
The hierarchy isn’t pretty, but it’s real.
Hungry people are less likely to vote for carbon pricing. They vote for whoever promises bread… or they take from anyone who has it.
Counterpoint
The standard logic is that a climate fix is possible, and it will also fix the food supply.
Stabilise temperatures and rainfall, and agriculture can adapt. By investing in renewable energy and sustainable farming, we can solve both crises together.
It’s an elegant story that lets us feel good about complicated solutions to wicked problems.
But elegance isn’t evidence.
The timeframes don’t match. Climate policies work over generations, and that’s making the big assumption that policy implementation will stabilise the weather.
Food insecurity works over seasons. A drought that destroys this year’s wheat crop doesn’t wait for carbon markets to mature or for fusion power to scale. It just destroys the wheat.
The priorities reveal themselves in a simple thought experiment.
Imagine you’re designing policy for a nation where millions depend on subsistence farming. Do you spend your limited resources on solar panels that might stabilise the climate in thirty years, or on soil restoration that increases yields this season?
Do you fund carbon capture research or grain storage that prevents post-harvest losses?
The uncomfortable truth is that societies collapse from food shortages, not from emissions targets.
Ancient civilisations didn’t fall because they failed to manage their carbon footprint. They fell because they couldn’t feed their people.
Thought Challenge
Map the timeframes… Take one climate intervention and one food security intervention that have similar costs. Chart their impact trajectories over 5, 15, and 30 years. Ask yourself which crisis can afford to wait for long-term solutions.
Follow the riot logic... Research three historical examples of food-price riots or harvest failures that led to social unrest. Note how quickly stability collapsed when people couldn’t eat. Then ask what climate policies remain viable when governments are fighting for survival.
Both exercises force you past the comfortable both-and thinking that dominates policy discourse. They reveal the sceptic’s insight that good intentions don’t resolve trade-offs. Reality does.
Closing Reflection
Being a mindful sceptic about priorities doesn’t mean dismissing climate science or abandoning long-term thinking. It means acknowledging that hungry people make desperate choices, and desperate choices reshape everything else.
We would argue that the climate movement’s greatest weakness isn’t denialism from fossil fuel companies and all the political pressure that generates. It’s the assumption that rational policies survive irrational social conditions.
Food security isn’t a competitor to climate change.
It’s the foundation that makes climate action possible.
Evidence Support
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2015). Status of the World’s Soil Resources: Main Report. FAO.
TL;DR… global assessment found that 33% of agricultural land is moderately to highly degraded due to erosion, nutrient depletion, acidification, and salinisation. The report presents evidence that such degradation directly compromises long-term food production, threatening both global food security and ecosystem health.
Relevance to insight… Essential for understanding the scale and systemic risks posed by soil degradation globally; directly supports the insight that intensive agriculture undermines future food production and sustainability.
Erb, K.-H., et al. (2016). Land management: data availability and process understanding for global change studies. Global Change Biology, 22(4), 1346–1363.
TL;DR… global synthesis of how land management practices drive long-term changes in soil fertility, carbon stocks, and food production resilience. Demonstrates that intensification often leads to soil carbon loss, biodiversity reduction, and increased environmental vulnerability.
Relevance to insight… conversion from traditional to industrial, energy-intensive agriculture is central to sustainability trade-offs.
Folke, C., et al. (2016). Resilience and sustainable development: Building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. Ambio, 45(1), 2-12.
TL;DR… global, cross-sectoral evidence suggests that food supply chains are becoming increasingly fragile in the face of shocks and stresses. Resilience depends on ecological knowledge, diverse production systems, and adaptive governance.
Relevance to insight… super-efficient, market-optimised food supply chains increase vulnerability and risk, highlighting the need for resilience rather than just efficiency.
Tilman, D., Balzer, C., Hill, J., & Befort, B. L. (2011). Global food demand and the sustainable intensification of agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20260–20264.
TL;DR… Models the projection that global food demand will increase by 70-100% by 2050 and lays out the environmental consequences of various intensification paths for agriculture, focusing on land use, nutrient loading, greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity impacts.
Relevance to insight… quantitative evidence on the linkage between population growth, food demand, and the tension between production, environmental impacts, and long-term sustainability.
Smith, P., et al. (2016). Agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU). In Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Cambridge University Press.
TL;DR… global data showing that agricultural soils are both major sources and potential sinks for greenhouse gases, with management practices being the critical determinant for long-term sustainability and climate mitigation.
Relevance to insight… the consequences of energy-blind food production systems and the urgent need to integrate climate and ecosystem priorities into agriculture.
These papers provide independent, rigorously peer-reviewed evidence underpinning the insight that modern, energy-intensive agricultural systems have created unsustainable trajectories for global food production, that soil and land degradation pose strategic risks, and that only ecological knowledge, resilience, and systems change will ensure long-term food security.