Climate change has likely already affected global food production
By D. Ray, Paul C. West, Michael A. Clark, James Gerber, Alexander V. Prishchepov, Snigdha Chatterjee. PLoS ONE, 2019
789 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Crop yields are projected to decrease under future climate conditions, and recent research suggests that yields have already been impacted. However, current impacts on a diversity of crops subnationally and implications for food security remains unclear. Here, we constructed linear regression relationships using weather and reported crop data to assess the potential impact of observed climate change on the yields of the top ten global crops–barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat at ~20,000 political units. We find that the impact of global climate change on yields of different crops from climate trends ranged from -13.4% (oil palm) to 3.5% (soybean). Our results show that impacts are mostly negative in Europe, Southern Africa and Australia but generally positive in Latin America. Impacts in Asia and Northern and Central America are mixed. This has likely led to ~1% average reduction (-3.5 X 1013 kcal/year) in consumable food calories in these ten crops. In nearly half of food insecure countries, estimated caloric availability decreased. Our results suggest that climate change has already affected global food production.
Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7a660df1dabbf1073bcc55226a8ad0fda60a123
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Citations in the corpus
- Drought Stress Impacts on Plants and Different Approaches to Alleviate Its Adverse Effects (2021, background): “If expected increases in air temperature around 2 °C greater than present levels occur by the end of this century, approximately one fifth of the world population will be affected by severe water deficit [34].”