The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Remember, even with the remarkable gains of the last decades, we do not presently live in a world without hunger. Far from it: most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally, with as many as 100 million hungry because of climate shocks. What is called “hidden hunger”—micronutrient and dietary deficiencies—is considerably higher, affecting well over 1 billion people. The spring of 2017 brought an unprecedented quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the United Nations warned that those separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million that year. That was a single year in a single region. Africa is today straining to feed about 1 billion people, a population expected to quadruple over the course of the twenty-first century to 4 billion.