Environmental Justice Coalition

We are working to help our communities prepare for the challenges we are facing due to climate change.

Growing food scarcity and malnutrition is an issue we are concerned with addressing as climate causes more crop failures and diminishing uptake of nutrients into the plants we eat, feed our loved ones, and upon which livestock is raised.

“A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.

Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.”

A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”

The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior. Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.” Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/climate/climate-change-food-supply.html

Food prices are increasing beyond what many people in our county can afford, and this trend is expected to continue as more crop yields are negatively affected by changing weather patterns.

Our first project is to evaluate the feasibility of creating community foraging rights and opportunities in our public parks. We also hope to build a broad container gardening movement in McDonough County to help families supplement their diets with regular access to fresh, nutritious food.

In December, we hosted a discussion with Fred Greenwood, President of the Obama Legacy Initiative (OLI). He met with community members and shared the projects the OLI has been successfully building to address food scarcity/food desserts.