More than 150 Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates are making an urgent plea for world leaders to invest in “moonshot” technologies to address an increasingly dire global hunger crisis that is only getting worse in the face of climate change.
In an open letter published Tuesday, the experts — luminaries in fields spanning climate science, economics, physics, chemistry, medicine, and agriculture — seek political will and financial support for agricultural research and innovation that will help alter the current trajectory, which they call a “tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand.”
Today, more than 700 million people worldwide don’t have enough food to eat, and those figures are likely to get worse: Climate change is set to decrease productivity of major food staples at a time when the world is projected to add some 1.5 billion people by midcentury.