Climate change poses a risk to global food security.

Weather and climate extremes, such as prolonged drought, heavy rainfall and heatwaves, can lead to harvest failures. These are occurring with increased magnitude and frequency on a warming planet.

In addition, such events can disrupt supply chains, decreasing food supply and leading to price spikes.

Our previous work shows that when extreme weather events happen simultaneously – such as a heatwave and drought at the same time – this can negatively affect crop yields in major crop-producing regions, known as “breadbaskets”.

This co-occurrence constitutes a growing food security risk.

In our latest paper, published in Nature Communications, we highlight factors that can lead to low crop yields in several breadbasket regions simultaneously. We also examine how well state-of-the-art climate and crop models are able to reproduce observed relationships.

We find that climate models tend to underestimate the risks of concurrent extreme weather events, potentially leading to “blind spots” in our understanding of future implications.

Complex climate risks
Ensuring global food security under changing climate conditions is a global challenge.

READ further from the sources above