What Trump 2.0 Means for the Future of Climate Change

Climate change does not care who is the President of the United States. Now is the time to take a hard look at how climate change will impact your supply chains over the next 10 years.

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This week, the White House welcomed a new administration and welcomed back a familiar President. But what exactly will Trump 2.0 mean for America and the world considering his proposal for huge increase in tariffs, and a second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement?

For those impacted by climate change — that is, all of us — none of this will matter much. Climate change doesn’t care who the President of the United States is, and over the next four years, its impacts will only accelerate.

At this point in the fight against climate change, it is clear that global leaders have failed. The most recent COP29 in Baku is the perfect example of what a farce these meetings have become — after all, fossil fuel-linked lobbyists outnumber the delegations of almost every country at the talks. This inaction is happening against the most frightening rise in temperatures ever seen. The most recent report by the Climate Action Tracker estimates that global temperatures are on track to rise roughly 2.7℃, far above the 1.5℃ agreed on at the 2015 Paris Agreement. Worse of all, not only has the earth been exceptionally warm of late, with every month from June 2023 until September 2024 breaking heat records, it has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected. And there is no end in sight to the acceleration. 

Hotter temperatures mean more natural disasters, droughts, floods, wildfires and even diseases. The industry most impacted, but least talked about, is the global food system. 

Historically, agriculture has been sensitive to weather patterns, but the frequency and severity of climate-related disruptions are unprecedented. These disruptions are not confined to a single region or crop. Across the globe, from oranges in Brazil to coffee in Vietnam, permanently shifting weather patterns are squeezing supplies and driving up prices. 

A study by the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research projects that global food inflation rates could rise by up to 3.2% annually within the next decade due to higher temperatures. The reality is stark: as climate change intensifies, the agricultural sector is increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather, which in turn undermines food security and economic stability.

To make matters worse, the procurement and sourcing teams for the largest agri-food companies in the world are understaffed, overstretched, and have never faced an environment like this. 

Let’s be clear, these are teams that have never needed to take climate into account when making sourcing decisions over a 10-year horizon. But if these companies do not actively start to take climate into consideration in their longer-term supply chain strategies, we are doomed to a world where stockouts, leaner profit margins, mass bankruptcies of agri-food companies and food shortages become the norm. 

For the agri-food leaders of the world, forget trying to improve and mitigate your existing supply chains at the margins. Ignore marginal gains from sustainability and regenerative agriculture and go all in on adaptation to a world that is 3℃ warmer. 

This means taking a hard look at how climate change will impact your supply chains over the next 10 years, and making the difficult decisions to move away from the places that are too risky to depend on and toward the places that will benefit. The process is more complicated than just leaving behind the existing infrastructure you’ve built in existing regions. It requires building facilities and supplier capacity in these new regions so they can start to support global needs — an evolution that will take many years of engagement. 

Climate change does not care who’s president; the world is in for the worst decade of climate catastrophes and food insecurity in modern history. It’s up to global business leaders to step up and start making the hard choices to secure today’s – and tomorrow’s -- global food supply. Otherwise, expect a winter of stock-outs, starvation and endless inflation. 

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