GARP Sustainability and Climate Risk Certificate Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture & Food Systems: practice questions

Question 1 · medium

Why are simultaneous harvest failures in several major breadbaskets treated as a systemic risk for global food supply?

1. Breadbaskets share one irrigation system, so a single canal failure stops production in all of them
2. World prices are fixed by treaty, so supply shortfalls never reach consumers in importing countries
3. Each breadbasket grows a different crop, so a failure in one is always offset by surplus in the others
4. Patterns such as ENSO link them, and joint shortfalls overwhelm trade and stocks

Question 2 · medium

A heatwave in a major wheat-exporting country cuts its harvest, and the government bans exports. What is the main way this harms poor households in distant importing countries?

1. The importing country's own farms lose all access to fertiliser that season
2. Higher world grain prices cut what poor net food buyers are able to afford
3. Imported grain becomes contaminated with heat-produced toxins in transit
4. Heat travels with the traded grain and damages crops in the importing country

Question 3 · medium

Why can a season with normal total monsoon rainfall still produce low rainfed yields?

1. Late onset, dry breaks or early withdrawal stress crops at critical stages
2. Rainfall totals are measured only at the coast, which never reflects inland farms
3. Normal rainfall always causes waterlogging, which kills rainfed crops within days
4. Rainfed crops need no water after sowing, so the rain timing has no effect at all

Question 4 · medium

An oyster hatchery on an upwelling coast suffers repeated larval die-offs. Which climate-related cause is most likely, and what is the standard response?

1. Corrosive low-pH upwelled water; monitor and buffer the intake water chemistry
2. Too little salt from melting sea ice; add fresh water to dilute the intake
3. Excess dissolved oxygen in cold water; heat the tanks to drive off the oxygen
4. Higher seawater pH from warming; add carbon dioxide to the tanks to lower it

Question 5 · medium

After a cyclone surge floods coastal rice fields, which recovery approach addresses the salinity problem most directly?

1. Apply extra nitrogen fertiliser so the crop can outgrow the salt in the same season
2. Leave the field flooded with seawater so the salt is diluted by the next tide
3. Burn crop residues on the field to evaporate the salt from the upper soil layer
4. Leach salts with fresh water and drainage, then sow salt-tolerant varieties

Question 6 · hard

A ministry adviser argues that because national cereal production is rising, climate change poses no food-security risk. What is the strongest response?

1. Cereal production is irrelevant to food security, which depends only on fish supply
2. National production is always measured incorrectly, so the trend cannot be trusted
3. Production is only availability; access, utilisation and stability may still fail
4. Rising production proves climate change is beneficial, so the adviser can be considered correct

Question 7 · medium

What is a main weakness of statistical yield–weather models for projecting impacts decades ahead?

1. They always overestimate yields because they ignore the effects of temperature
2. They assume past relationships hold despite new CO₂, technology and adaptation
3. They need daily cultivar coefficients that are never available for any crop
4. They cannot use real farm data and rely only on greenhouse experiments for inputs

Question 8 · hard

Why did Zhao and colleagues (2017) combine four methods to estimate temperature effects on global crop yields?

1. The journal required four methods, and the result from each was simply added together
2. Each method has different biases, so agreement across them makes the estimate more robust
3. Only statistical methods give valid results, and the others were included for comparison only
4. No single method can produce any estimate at all, so four were needed to obtain one number

Question 9 · hard

Why are crop-model impact estimates that omit pests, diseases, ozone and waterlogging generally considered optimistic?

1. These omitted stresses always increase yields, so leaving them out exaggerates losses
2. These omitted stresses add losses, so leaving them out understates damage
3. These omitted stresses are already counted twice in the temperature response
4. These omitted stresses only affect quality, so leaving them out has no effect on yields

Question 10 · hard

A district relieves drought by drilling deep tube wells that are pumped faster than the aquifer recharges. How is this best classified?

1. Mitigation, because it reduces greenhouse gas emissions from irrigation pumps
2. Transformational adaptation, because it permanently removes drought risk
3. Maladaptation, because it reduces present risk while raising future vulnerability
4. Incremental adaptation with no trade-offs, because water is always renewable