Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation

Hultgren et al., 2025

Climate change threatens global food systems, but the extent to which adaptation will reduce losses remains unknown and controversial. Even within the well-studied context of US agriculture, some analyses argue that adaptation will be widespread and climate damages small, whereas others conclude that adaptation will be limited and losses severe. Scenario-based analyses indicate that adaptation should have notable consequences on global agricultural productivity, but there has been no systematic study of how extensively real-world producers actually adapt at the global scale. Here we empirically estimate the impact of global producer adaptations using longitudinal data on six staple crops spanning 12,658 regions, capturing two-thirds of global crop calories. We estimate that global production declines 5.5 × 1014 kcal annually per 1 °C global mean surface temperature (GMST) rise (120 kcal per person per day or 4.4% of recommended consumption per 1 °C; P < 0.001). We project that adaptation and income growth alleviate 23% of global losses in 2050 and 34% at the end of the century (6% and 12%, respectively; moderate-emissions scenario), but substantial residual losses remain for all staples except rice. In contrast to analyses of other outcomes that project the greatest damages to the global poor, we find that global impacts are dominated by losses to modern-day breadbaskets with favourable climates and limited present adaptation, although losses in low-income regions losses are also substantial. These results indicate a scale of innovation, cropland expansion or further adaptation that might be necessary to ensure food security in a changing climate.

a–f, Colours indicate central estimate in a high-emissions scenario (RCP 8.5), net of adaptation costs and benefits, for maize (a), soybean (b), rice (c), wheat (d), cassava (e) and sorghum (f) for 2089–2098. Projections computed for 24,378 subnational units relative to counterfactual yields, uncropped regions are shaded in grey. Wheat shows winter wheat and spring wheat projections combined, weighted by their area share in each region. Estimates in each location are ensemble means across climate and statistical uncertainty. Incomes from SSP3.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

The Tipping Points of Climate Change — and Where We Stand 

Johan Rockström

Les invasions biologiques 

Franck Courchamp

 Peter Singer: Animal suffering is human responsibility

Regenerative agriculture: The evidence 

British Ecological Society

Life in Syntropy 

What's Happening At Göbekli Tepe

An update with Field Director Dr Lee Clare

Soil microbial effects on plant community responses to fire in longleaf pine savannas

Anita Simha and Gaurav Kandlikar

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

Steffen et al., 2018

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

Stability landscape showing the pathway of the Earth System out of the Holocene and thus, out of the glacial–interglacial limit cycle to its present position in the hotter Anthropocene. The fork in the road is shown here as the two divergent pathways of the Earth System in the future (broken arrows). Currently, the Earth System is on a Hothouse Earth pathway driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases and biosphere degradation toward a planetary threshold at ∼2 °C, beyond which the system follows an essentially irreversible pathway driven by intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks. The other pathway leads to Stabilized Earth, a pathway of Earth System stewardship guided by human-created feedbacks to a quasistable, human-maintained basin of attraction. “Stability” (vertical axis) is defined here as the inverse of the potential energy of the system. Systems in a highly stable state (deep valley) have low potential energy, and considerable energy is required to move them out of this stable state. Systems in an unstable state (top of a hill) have high potential energy, and they require only a little additional energy to push them off the hill and down toward a valley of lower potential energy

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

Global Food Quantity and Diversity to Drop by More than Half with Our Accelerated Climate Warming

Paul Beckwith