A team at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE), a centre under Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC), has developed a tool that can predict, with a resolution of 9.3 by 9.3 kilometres, how the planet will gradually lose its capacity to produce food as climate change advances.
Its name is CADI, the English acronym for Climate-Induced Agricultural Decline Index, and its function is easy to explain, though not to calculate: it compares how much a plot of land could yield under different climatic conditions, keeping fixed the crops that were already being grown in 2020. This isolates the pure effect of climate, without mixing it with human decisions about what to plant or how to adapt.
