Seven years in the making, a new report on climate change warns of food crises, global destabilisation.

The word is out: we are simply unprepared for what’s coming. The latest report (the summary of which was released last week) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s voice on climate science, titled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, details the impacts of climate change to date, the future risks from a changing climate, and the opportunities for effective action to reduce risks.

The report finds that the world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for the risks from a changing climate. One of the bigger risks is that a changing climate will place limits on staple crops and the variability of crop yields will also increase year to year. The rising food prices that accompany this uncertainty will affect the world’s poorest and countries in and near the tropics like Pakistan will bear the brunt of climate change.

The IPCC’s new report — which took seven years to prepare by a total of 309 lead authors and review editors selected from 70 countries — finds that there is “widespread” evidence of climate change impacts “on all continents and across the oceans”. For the first time, the IPCC has scientifically linked the changing climate with the destabilisation of nation states. It is also “increasingly confident” of serious effects on food crops, water supplies, human health and the loss of global species.

This report is a follow-up to another major report on the physical science of climate change that was released last September by the IPCC. It concluded that the scientific evidence for climate change was “unequivocal,” with human activity “extremely likely” to be the cause.

Here are some of the most important conclusions of the recent report: “Negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts (high confidence)” and “throughout the 21st century, climate change is expected to lead to increases in ill-health in many regions, especially in developing countries with low income, as compared to a baseline without climate change (high confidence)”.

The report also warns of: “… the combination of high temperature and humidity compromising normal human activities, including growing food or working outdoors in some areas for parts of the year (high confidence)” and that “climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks (medium confidence)”.

In South Asia, the IPCC says that glaciers will continue to shrink in the Himalayas, severely impacting the availability of water for farming. Climate change will also damage heat-sensitive crops like wheat and corn, and have a smaller impact on rice and soy production. Prices for essential foods will rise in the global market and hunger will increase in large parts of Asia and Africa. “Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” predicted the IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri at a recent news conference.

The new report says that all this will happen in the near to long-term future, but in Pakistan it is already happening. Five years ago a study titled “Food Insecurity in Pakistan 2009” carried out by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) showed that 48.6 per cent of the population was food insecure, out of which 22.4pc was extremely poor. Due to the massive floods of 2010 triggered by “unprecedented rainfall” these numbers have only gotten worse. In fact, according to Oxfam, the last four years of continuous flooding in the country has had a long-term impact on farmers’ ability to produce food. According to the more recent National Nutrition Survey 2011, around 58pc of Pakistan’s households are facing food insecurity and in these households almost 50pc of the women and children are malnourished.

Farmers in the country already know that the weather is changing and they are trying desperately to adapt without much help from the government. The recent BBC Climate Asia survey, in fact, found that farmers in Pakistan and China are taking the most action to respond to climate change in the region. Pakistani farmers need all the help they can get and the government really needs to do more to support them to battle climate change. In the US, President Obama is setting up “climate hubs” to help farmers and rural communities adapt to extreme weather conditions and other effects of climate change. These hubs will act as information centres and help farmers and ranchers handle risks, including fires, pests, floods and droughts that are exacerbated by global warming.

Consumers in urban centres are also facing the brunt of steadily rising food prices. And this is happening all over the world — a recent report by Oxfam warns that global warming may delay the fight against world hunger by decades and put an extra 50 million people at risk. The world “is woefully unprepared for the impacts on food,” says Oxfam, with spending on agricultural research and development at an all-time low.

The IPCC has called upon policymakers to prepare right now for an increasingly uncertain future. Christopher Field, the IPCC Working Group II co-chair, stated: “The risks to global food security are really profound and a really strong motivation … for making smart decisions to ensure we have a world that can cope effectively with these problems.” He explained further: “Climate-change adaptation is not an exotic agenda that has never been tried. Governments, firms, and communities around the world are building experience with adaptation. This experience forms a starting point for bolder, more ambitious adaptations that will be important as climate and society continue to change.”