income countries are relatively more affected than some other regions due to their geographical location, and to the higher vulnerability of their food consumer to change in agricultural prices.

The agriculture and forestry sectors will likely be increasingly asked to contribute to mitigation efforts as well. This participation to achieve GHG reductions could present opportunities for land use sectors, with new demand for biomass, potential payments for carbon sequestration and higher margins for producers. However, mitigation policies could also bring significant challenges, because production costs will also increase with expansion of the production, and the deployment of new technologies will require some significant restructuring of the sectors. More worrying, the consumers will be more directly affected by the increased market prices, with potential challenges for food security.

Comparing the climate change impacts on food availability with the effects of mitigation, if mitigation is not implemented carefully, it could potentially bring worse effects for food availability than climate change itself, at least in the medium term. Hence, a careful design of mitigation policies needs to be adopted by targeting priority sectors and sources where emission abatement can be achieved at lowest costs, without hampering food provision. The contribution of the poorest regions to such scheme should be envisaged prudently, in order to avoid a double burden for people already facing the most severe climate change impact challenges. On the other side, the carbon tax revenue represents a potentially substantial source of new fiscal income, which if managed properly, could be used for funding of direct development programs and hence converted from a thread to an opportunity for the poor.

This study presents a first attempt to provide consistent quantitative assessment of climate change impacts and mitigation in agriculture and forestry on markets and food availability in low and medium income countries. Future improvements could go in several directions. For instance, we have ignored the combined effects of climate change and mitigation. We are convinced that this remains a second order effect of the extreme climate scenarios considered by the present paper, however if intermediate scenarios such as RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 with non‐negligible aspects of both climate change impacts and mitigation were to be considered, the two phenomenon might represent important feedbacks; e.g. climate change impacts reducing biomass productivity and hence making the provision of the bioenergy sector more expensive _versus_ afforestation occupying vast areas of land making it not available for crop area expansion to moderate the negative climate impacts.

To conclude, the projected effects of climate change and mitigation on agricultural markets raise important issues for food security in the long run, but remain more limited in the medium term horizon of 2030, providing opportunities for low‐ and middle‐income countries to pursue immediate development needs and thus prepare for later periods when adaptation needs and mitigation efforts will become the greatest.

# **References**

> Alexandratos, N., Bruinsma, J., 2012. World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050: The 2012 Revision. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.

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