Global crop yield response to extreme heat stress under multiple climate change futures

By D. Deryng, D. Conway, Navin Ramankutty, J. Price, R. Warren. 2014

639 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extreme heat stress during the crop reproductive period can be critical for crop productivity. Projected changes in the frequency and severity of extreme climatic events are expected to negatively impact crop yields and global food production. This study applies the global crop model PEGASUS to quantify, for the first time at the global scale, impacts of extreme heat stress on maize, spring wheat and soybean yields resulting from 72 climate change scenarios for the 21st century. Our results project maize to face progressively worse impacts under a range of RCPs but spring wheat and soybean to improve globally through to the 2080s due to CO2 fertilization effects, even though parts of the tropic and sub-tropic regions could face substantial yield declines. We find extreme heat stress at anthesis (HSA) by the 2080s (relative to the 1980s) under RCP 8.5, taking into account CO2 fertilization effects, could double global losses of maize yield (ΔY = −12.8 ± 6.7% versus − 7.0 ± 5.3% without HSA), reduce projected gains in spring wheat yield by half (ΔY = 34.3 ± 13.5% versus 72.0 ± 10.9% without HSA) and in soybean yield by a quarter (ΔY = 15.3 ± 26.5% versus 20.4 ± 22.1% without HSA). The range reflects uncertainty due to differences between climate model scenarios; soybean exhibits both positive and negative impacts, maize is generally negative and spring wheat generally positive. Furthermore, when assuming CO2 fertilization effects to be negligible, we observe drastic climate mitigation policy as in RCP 2.6 could avoid more than 80% of the global average yield losses otherwise expected by the 2080s under RCP 8.5. We show large disparities in climate impacts across regions and find extreme heat stress adversely affects major producing regions and lower income countries.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1b518b1060752ef35b87222d751054315f09de2

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Citations in the corpus

Heat stress-reduced kernel weight in rice at anthesis is associated with impaired source-sink relationship and sugars allocation (2018, background): “, 2014), which can severely reduce crop yield and quality, especially for rice (Deryng et al., 2014; Lobell et al., 2011).”
Heat stress effects and management in wheat. A review (2017, background): “Deryng et al. (2014) contributed greatly to current understanding of climate change impacts on crops under heat stress and elevated CO2 environment.”
Wheat yield loss attributable to heat waves, drought and water excess at the global, national and subnational scales (2017, background): “Indeed, changes in wheat yield variability have already been suggested as one of the primary factors influencing global food prices, market stability and food security, especially in developing countries (FAO 2011, OXFAM 2012, Porter et al 2014, Deryng et al 2014, GFS 2015).”
Influence of extreme weather disasters on global crop production (2016, background): “Firstly, several regional empirical studies have highlighted the adverse impacts of extreme heat events on crop yields 10–13 , and global modeling efforts have estimated future crop yield declines due to increasing extreme heat stress 14,15 .”
The effect of high temperature stress on male and female reproduction in plants (2015, background): “The likelihood that agriculture can adapt to global change will depend upon an understanding of how predicted changes will impact agricultural crops and management systems (Deryng et al., 2014; Lobell and Tebaldi, 2014; Siebert and Ewert, 2014).”