The world’s changing environment needs to be addressed by world leaders and mankind. We can all implement simple changes in our daily lives that can benefit us all by saving energy consumption, thus saving money on our bills, and making our environment healthier and cleaner to work and live in. If the increasing carbon foot-prints, greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide emissions go unchecked there can be detrimental consequences for us all.

As the world warms, plants we depend on for food are likely to become less nutritious. That is the worrying conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 studies investigating how crops will react to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

Global warming has brought about an increase in floods, droughts, causing ever more frequent crops failures in poor countries. The plants that weather the storm through global warming produce less protein. 

Studies in the past linking these changes to crop yields have produced variable results. Even small variations in growing conditions-whether a plant is found in the ground or in a pot can have a big impact. 

New techniques are starting to address these issues. By controlling the amounts of different gases being sprayed over crops grown in the open air, researchers are able to build up more reliable data. 

Daub Taub and colleagues at South-western University in Georgetown Texas, combined results from over 20 years of such work. Their results were disturbing. For wheat, barley, rice and potatoes, protein levels dropped by 15-per-cent when carbon dioxide levels rose. The change happens in part due to plants taking in more carbon they produce carbohydrates at the expense of protein. 

People living in developed countries tend to get their protein from meat, but Taub estimates in around 30 poor countries they get their protein from crops. In Bangladesh 80-per-cent of protein comes from crops. 

In Taub studies he found changes could have a dramatic impact on nutrition levels- but disaster can be averted. In some of his findings Taub looked at CO, concentrations were over twice as high as today’s, a level that more optimistic scenarios predict we should never reach. Even if levels do rise, better agriculture management could raise soil nitrogen levels, which would help the crops yield more protein, according to Arnold Bloom, a plant biologist at the University of California, Davis.