Climate change is making droughts and heatwaves more frequent worldwide. As a result, the risk of simultaneous crop failures across several of the world's "breadbaskets" is much greater than it was 50 years ago, researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) report in the journal "Nature Climate Change". In a worst-case scenario, staple foods would become massively more expensive, with famines, political unrest and increased migration as the consequence.

The researchers led by Franziska Gaupp from IIASA in Laxenburg near Vienna examined how great the risk is that harvests could fail catastrophically in several of the most important growing regions (USA, Argentina, Europe, Russia and Ukraine, China, India, Indonesia and Brazil) due to extreme climate events.

Read the full report on derstandard.at!