How Climate Change Is Raising Your Grocery Bill

A customer's food items, including fresh vegetables, on the conveyor belt of a check-out desk inside a Caprabo SA supermarket in Barcelona, Spain, on Friday, Nov. 4, 2022. Soaring prices continue to weigh on activity in the euro zone's fourth-biggest economy. Photo by Angel Garcia /Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — A 300% spike in Australian lettuce prices. A 50% rise for European olive oil and 80% for US vegetables. Researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the European Central Bank have traced back those price jumps to extreme weather they say is linked to climate change.

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The group analyzed 16 weather events around the world between 2022 and 2024. Many were so unusual that a given region had experienced nothing like it prior to 2020, according to the analysis, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters on Monday in Europe. 

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“Unprecedented conditions are set to become increasingly common across the world,” the study’s authors say. “At the same time, new records for extreme conditions will continue to be set, further from those to which agricultural production and economic systems are currently adapted.”

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Climate change brings with it higher temperatures and extreme rains, which can lower yields and make the crops that are harvested more expensive. British households’ food bill, for instance, was £361 (about $484) more in 2022 and 2023 due to climate change, according to estimates by the nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. (ECIU staffer Tom Lancaster was a coauthor of the new study.)

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Consumers globally say they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.  

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Here are a few of the price hikes the researchers identified:

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Soaring US vegetable prices

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In 2022, California registered its driest three-year period ever recorded, leaving nearly a million acres of farm fields unplanted and producing initial crop revenue losses of nearly $2 billion that year alone. Arizona, which grows most of the US’s winter lettuce supply, also saw reductions in the amount of water the state received from the Colorado River, due to a drought-related water shortage in the river basin. These conditions in two major US agricultural states, paired with Hurricane Ian hitting Florida, contributed to a more than 80% hike in the country’s vegetable prices compared with the previous year.  

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A wide-reaching Asia heat wave

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A heat wave that warmed Asia last year to temperatures as high as 115F (46C) was one of the disruptive weather events that led to vegetable prices in China rising more than 40% between June and September.

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Hot and dry conditions also left South Korean cabbages nearly 70% more expensive than the year prior, according to local media reports. Napa cabbage is commonly pickled into kimchi, a staple local dish, and the government has utilized national stocks to bolster supplies. 

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Australian lettuce’s 300% hike

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Eastern Australia faced record-breaking extreme flooding in early 2022, which was soon estimated to be Australia’s costliest ever flood and its fifth most costly disaster. A resulting lettuce shortage led shoppers to complain about prices of around A$12 ($7.81) for a head of iceberg lettuce. The lettuce previously cost roughly A$2.80 a piece, according to the Guardian, representing a more than 300% price increase. Fast food chain KFC even began substituting in cabbage in its burgers.

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Is climate inflation permanent?

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Prices tend to respond as soon as one or two months after an instance of extreme heat or drought, says Max Kotz, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He and the other authors also looked at how unusual weather events were for each region, based on the distribution of measures like temperature over time.