A 300 percent spike in Australian lettuce prices. A 50 percent rise for European olive oil and 80 percent for US vegetables. Researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the European Central Bank have traced back those price jumps to extreme weather they say is linked to climate change.
The group analyzed 16 weather events around the world between 2022 and last year. Many were so unusual that a given region had experienced nothing like it prior to 2020, according to the analysis, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters on Monday in Europe.
“Unprecedented conditions are set to become increasingly common across the world,” the study said. “At the same time, new records for extreme conditions will continue to be set, further from those to which agricultural production and economic systems are currently adapted.”
Climate change brings with it higher temperatures and extreme rains, which can lower yields and make the crops that are harvested more expensive. British households’ food bill, for instance, was ￡361 (US$487) more in 2022 and 2023 due to climate change, according to estimates by the nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
Consumers globally say they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.
Here are a few of the price hikes the researchers identified:
In 2022, California registered its driest three-year period ever recorded, leaving nearly a million acres of farm fields unplanted and producing initial crop revenue losses of nearly US$2 billion that year alone. Arizona, which grows most of the US’ winter lettuce supply, also saw reductions in the amount of water the state received from the Colorado River, due to a drought-related water shortage in the river basin.
These conditions in two major US agricultural states, paired with Hurricane Ian hitting Florida, contributed to a more than 80 percent hike in the country’s vegetable prices compared with the previous year.
A heat wave that warmed Asia last year to temperatures as high as 46-°C was one of the disruptive weather events that led to vegetable prices in China rising more than 40 percent between June and September.
Hot and dry conditions also left South Korean cabbages nearly 70 percent more expensive than the year prior, local media reported. Napa cabbage is commonly pickled into kimchi, a staple local dish, and the government has utilized national stocks to bolster supplies.
Eastern Australia faced record-breaking extreme flooding in early 2022, which was soon estimated to be Australia’s costliest ever flood and its fifth most costly disaster. A resulting lettuce shortage led shoppers to complain about prices of about A$12 (US$7.81) for a head of iceberg lettuce. The lettuce previously cost about A$2.80 apiece, representing a more than 300 percent price increase. Fast food chain KFC even began substituting cabbage in its burgers.
Prices tend to respond as soon as one or two months after an instance of extreme heat or drought, says Max Kotz, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He and the other authors also looked at how unusual weather events were for each region, based on the distribution of measures like temperature over time.
They found that heat, drought and floods were occurring at an increased intensity and frequency. El Nino, a climate pattern that occurred from 2023 to last year, likely also influenced the extreme weather observed, the authors said.
These kinds of food price shocks typically turn out to be short-term in nature, because high prices incentivize more production, which brings prices back down, Bloomberg Intelligence senior climate analyst Andrew Stevenson said.
Products like coffee and cattle are the exception, because they require certain conditions such as a tropical climate or large swathes of land for grazing that limit where they can be grown and bred.
Coffee and cattle futures, contracts that represent near-term pricing in those markets, have marched up in price since 2020 — in contrast with futures for a crop like corn that is more easily grown.
New US tariffs could further squeeze farmers abroad, Stevenson said.
“It puts producers in an uncomfortable position where the price of beef is too expensive to sell at home but not expensive enough to sell with a 50 percent tariff,” he said.
Extreme weather is only expected to continue, and the study recommends that countries consider policies that would help consumers manage rising food prices.
Ultimately, though, slashing greenhouse gas emissions and containing global warming would be key to reducing food price inflation risks, the authors said.
Climate forecasts can also provide early warnings, and farms can implement adaptations like irrigation, although both approaches have serious limitations.
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