The effects of climate extremes on global agricultural yields
By E. Vogel, Markus G. Donat, L. Alexander, Malte Meinshausen, D. Ray, D. Karoly, Nicolai Meinshausen, K. Frieler. Environmental Research Letters, 2019
694 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Climate extremes, such as droughts or heat waves, can lead to harvest failures and threaten the livelihoods of agricultural producers and the food security of communities worldwide. Improving our understanding of their impacts on crop yields is crucial to enhance the resilience of the global food system. This study analyses, to our knowledge for the first time, the impacts of climate extremes on yield anomalies of maize, soybeans, rice and spring wheat at the global scale using sub-national yield data and applying a machine-learning algorithm. We find that growing season climate factors—including mean climate as well as climate extremes—explain 20%–49% of the variance of yield anomalies (the range describes the differences between crop types), with 18%–43% of the explained variance attributable to climate extremes, depending on crop type. Temperature-related extremes show a stronger association with yield anomalies than precipitation-related factors, while irrigation partly mitigates negative effects of high temperature extremes. We developed a composite indicator to identify hotspot regions that are critical for global production and particularly susceptible to the effects of climate extremes. These regions include North America for maize, spring wheat and soy production, Asia in the case of maize and rice production as well as Europe for spring wheat production. Our study highlights the importance of considering climate extremes for agricultural predictions and adaptation planning and provides an overview of critical regions that are most susceptible to variations in growing season climate and climate extremes.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6c2a296a610e7353aad45cfe30d65c5e16f09c2
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Severity of drought and heatwave crop losses tripled over the last five decades in Europe (2021, background): “Climatolo-gical threshold-based approaches (e.g. Lobell et al (2013), Lüttger and Feike (2018), Vogel et al (2019)) may underestimate impacts of EWDs in the agriculture sector, because similar weather anomalies result in differing effects depending on the vulnerability of the exposed system (Lesk…”
- Global food self-sufficiency in the 21st century under sustainable intensification of agriculture (2020, background): “The extent to which yield gaps will be narrowed will also depend on climate change, which is expected to decrease crop productivity in major global breadbaskets (Schleussner et al 2018, Aggarwal et al 2019, Vogel et al 2019).”