Global scale climate–crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming

By David B. Lobell, Christopher B. Field. Environmental Research Letters, 2007

2,239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Changes in the global production of major crops are important drivers of food prices, food security and land use decisions. Average global yields for these commodities are determined by the performance of crops in millions of fields distributed across a range of management, soil and climate regimes. Despite the complexity of global food supply, here we show that simple measures of growing season temperatures and precipitation—spatial averages based on the locations of each crop—explain ∼30% or more of year-to-year variations in global average yields for the world’s six most widely grown crops. For wheat, maize and barley, there is a clearly negative response of global yields to increased temperatures. Based on these sensitivities and observed climate trends, we estimate that warming since 1981 has resulted in annual combined losses of these three crops representing roughly 40 Mt or $5 billion per year, as of 2002. While these impacts are small relative to the technological yield gains over the same period, the results demonstrate already occurring negative impacts of climate trends on crop yields at the global scale.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cab0ee490222d55d4392f0489f6d1785bf463aab

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

Citations in the corpus

Crop yield gaps: their importance, magnitudes, and causes. (2009, background): “maize yield potentials over the coming decades (40, 41), these small yield gaps imply that average farmer yields may begin to decline in these systems without significant genetic gains in yield potential, although much higher grain prices that would moti-”
Rhizosphere engineering: Enhancing sustainable plant ecosystem productivity (2017, neutral): “and 2002 reduced the yields of major cereals by almost $5 billion per year (Lobell and Field, 2007).”
Crops and climate change: progress, trends, and challenges in simulating impacts and informing adaptation. (2009, background): “However, climate change implies longer term relationships, and these are beginning to be explored (see Lobell and Field, 2007).”
The Poverty Implications of Climate-Induced Crop Yield Changes by 2030 (2010, background): “, 2008) and high sensitivity to extreme heat in both temperate and tropical maize (Schlenker and Roberts, 2008; Schlenker and Roberts, 2009), and is consistent with estimates of maize yield losses due to warming since 1980 (Lobell and Field, 2007).”
Impacts of recent climate change on Wisconsin corn and soybean yield trends (2008, background): “[ 14 ] global scale results that reported a " 8.3% decrease (per 1 ! C) for maize and " 1.3% for soybean.”
Impact of Climate Change on Crops Adaptation and Strategies to Tackle Its Outcome: A Review (2019, background): “3% with every 1 ◦C rise in temperature from the optimum growth temperature [55].”
Impact of future climate change on wheat production in relation to plant-available water capacity in a semiaridenvironment (2014, background): “Wheat is the most widely grown crop on earth (Lobell and Field 2007), constituting one of the major staple food for the world population (FAO 1995) and is the most extensively grown grain crop in Australia (ABARES 2011).”
Implications of climate change for agricultural productivity in the early twenty-first century (2010, background): “By fitting statistical relationships between growing season temperature, precipitation and global average yield for six major crops, Lobell & Field (2007) estimated that warming since 1981 has resulted in annual combined losses of 40 million tonne or US$5 billion (negative relationships between…”
Raising yield potential of wheat. II. Increasing photosynthetic capacity and efficiency. (2011, background): “Photosynthesis is particularly sensitive to inhibition by moderate heat stress and this inhibition generally translates into a decrease in yield (Lobell and Field, 2007).”
Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis (2015, background): “…climate change has begun to affect food output by increasing, in particular, the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as drought (Lobell and Field 2007); this impact is expected to become much more pronounced in coming decades, requiring ever-larger investments in new…”
Global potential to increase crop production through water management in rainfed agriculture (2009, background): “Whereas rising temperatures and regional soil moisture declines tend to negatively affect crop production (Parry et al 2004, Lobell and Field 2007, Battisti and Naylor 2009), direct effects of elevated CO2 upon plants will probably increase production (Tubiello and Ewert 2002, Challinor and Wheeler…”
The Influence of Climate Change on Global Crop Productivity1 (2012, background): “For example, rice actually benefits from higher Tmax in many locations, at least until Tmax exceeds values that cause direct heat damage, whereas higher Tmin is harmful (Welch et al., 2010).”