For millions of the world’s poorest people, the cost of simply eating could consume roughly half their income by 2050, according to new projections. The warning comes from a study that models how food, energy, and water security may evolve together in the coming decades.
“Anything that’s taking up half of your income is potentially destabilizing for your entire life,” says energy researcher Jennifer Morris from MIT, “because it leaves so few resources for the other critical needs and basic life necessities.”
A More Complete of Resource Security
Resource security refers to people’s access to and control over vital resources such as food, energy, and water. While each of these topics is studied extensively on its own, the researchers behind the new work argue that most analyses examine them in isolation rather than jointly. Given how closely these issues are connected, that gap matters.
To address it, Morris and her co-authors used a large-scale computer model called the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM). As they explain in their paper, GCAM simulates how energy, water, land, socioeconomics, and Earth systems co-evolve in response to various sources of future uncertainty. The model operates across 32 geopolitical regions, and within each region the population is divided into 10 income subgroups representing different portions of the income distribution.
The model produced 3,735 scenarios that the researchers consider feasible. The results indicate that income subgroups play a major role in determining future resource security.
“For a lot of these outcomes, the lower-income groups see much worse potential insecurity,” Morris says.
Where Food Costs Could Hit Hardest
Looking at median results—the midpoint across the 3,735 hypothetical scenarios—regions in Africa and India are projected to experience the highest food burden. By 2050, the poorest 10 percent of people in Western, Eastern, and Southern Africa would have to spend close to half their income on food: 48.4 percent, 42.5 percent, and 49.6 percent respectively.
The researchers attribute this to low regional income combined with high food prices that arise in scenarios where land is set aside for decarbonization measures such as bio-crops and forestation. The fact that the costs of fighting climate change are themselves a considerable source of pressure on resource security illustrates how delicate the balancing act is.
“This study shows that there is no single driver of future food, energy, and water insecurity,” says first author and environmental engineer Gi Joo Kim from Tulane University in New Orleans. “Income is important, but regional conditions, land use, energy systems, water availability, and consumer behavior all shape the risks people face.”
Inequality Within Regions
Price increases will affect everyone, but not equally. In Southern Africa, where the poorest could spend 49.6 percent of their income on food by 2050, the region’s richest would spend only 5.5 percent.
“For this type of study, where we’re focused on human well-being outcomes, the income piece is really important,” Morris says.
The researchers found that these kinds of income disparities exist widely across resource security. As the paper states, regional average outcomes obscure both extremely high burden outcomes for lower-income subgroups and extremely low burden outcomes for higher-income subgroups. For instance, the range of food burden for Western Africa’s lowest-income population extends from 18.5 percent to 77.5 percent, while the regional average only ranges between 5.4 percent and 24 percent.
Beyond Food: Energy and Water Pressures
The price hikes and pressure points extend well beyond food. In the Middle East and South Africa, projections suggest people will have to spend significantly more on energy, driven by high demand for residential cooling and heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in South Asia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, rapid growth and extensive groundwater extraction are expected to produce significant water scarcity issues.
Plausible Futures, Not Predictions
The researchers emphasize that their modeling only indicates plausible futures and does not identify any single scenario as most probable. They describe their work as a starting point that could be expanded in subsequent research.
“Our method was designed to identify the conditions that produce different resource security outcomes,” Kim says, “rather than to predict one most likely future.”
The findings are reported in Earth’s Future.
