Global warming and the resulting climate change will not only alter the world's temperature and push some species to extinction, but also drive food prices to go up because of widespread hunger.

According to charity organization Oxfam, the number of people possibly going hungry by 2050 due to climate change will rise by 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the overall global population.

Domesticated crops or plants

Oxfam noted that currently, farm yields are already affected by global warming. People already going hungry in the world's poorest nations will all the more get hungrier.

"The changing climate is already jeopardizing gains in the fight against hunger, and it looks set to worsen," Oxfam said. "A hot world is a hungry world."

Oxfam, because of climate change, found the following:

  • Global yields of maize were 3.8 per cent below over the past three decades
  • Wheat was 5.5 per cent lower in the same period

"Extreme heat is also likely to reduce nutrients in crops, affect livestock growth and productivity and increase crop contamination by poisonous fungal mycotoxins, the report warned," Oxfam said.

"These creeping, insidious changes in the seasons, such as longer, hotter dry periods, shorter growing periods and unpredictable rainfall patterns are bewildering farmers," the organization added.

UK wheat yields fell to their lowest levels in 20 years following the 2012 wettest year on record. The country was forced to import 2.5 million tonnes of wheat to sustain food supplies.

In the US, global prices of maize shot up as much as 40 per cent following the 2012 drought in the Midwest. Oxfam believed such scenario will become more frequent.

"Just as the evidence of man-made climate change is becoming stronger, so too is our understanding of how it hits people, especially around hunger. We've long known that climate change will mean lost crops, but increasingly we're seeing its impacts through higher food prices, lower earnings, more health problems and lower quality food too," Tim Gore, head of policy for Oxfam's Grow campaign, said.

A mature wheat field in Israel