Society will collapse by 2040 due to catastrophic food shortages, says study

An newspaper article, published in The Independent, UK, on 24 June 2015, focuses on a recent Lloyd's Emerging Risk Report.  Dr Aled Jones, the Director of the Global Sustainability Institute, told Insurge Intelligence, a crowd-funded investigative journalism project :  

'We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend.' 

The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption. The model, developed at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI), UK, through a project called the ‘Global Resource Observatory’ (GRO), does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behaviour and policies. The scenario was developed for Lloyds by the Anglia Ruskin University team with the British Foreign Office’s UK/US Task Force on Resilience of the Global Food Supply Chain to Extreme Events.