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Stronger temperature–moisture couplings exacerbate the impact of climate warming on global crop yields

Nature Food volume 2, pages 683–691 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Rising air temperatures are a leading risk to global crop production. Recent research has emphasized the critical role of moisture availability in regulating crop responses to heat and the importance of temperature–moisture couplings in driving concurrent heat and drought. Here, we demonstrate that the heat sensitivity of key global crops depends on the local strength of couplings between temperature and moisture in the climate system. Over 1970–2013, maize and soy yields dropped more during hotter growing seasons in places where decreased precipitation and evapotranspiration more strongly accompanied higher temperatures, suggestive of compound heat–drought impacts on crops. On the basis of this historical pattern and a suite of climate model projections, we show that changes in temperature–moisture couplings in response to warming could enhance the heat sensitivity of these crops as temperatures rise, worsening the impact of warming by −5% (−17 to 11% across climate models) on global average. However, these changes will benefit crops where couplings weaken, including much of Asia, and projected impacts are highly uncertain in some regions. Our results demonstrate that climate change will impact crops not only through warming but also through changing drivers of compound heat–moisture stresses, which may alter the sensitivity of crop yields to heat as warming proceeds. Robust adaptation of cropping systems will need to consider this underappreciated risk to food production from climate change.

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Fig. 1: Crop yield sensitivity to temperature and temperature–moisture couplings across global croplands.
Fig. 2: Global dependence of yield sensitivity to temperature on two temperature–moisture couplings.
Fig. 3: Schematic of potential mechanisms for compound heat and moisture impacts on crops in regions with strong temperature–moisture couplings.
Fig. 4: Projected future changes in temperature–moisture couplings and yield sensitivity to temperature in response to warming.
Fig. 5: Projected additional impact of future warming on maize yields due to changing temperature–moisture couplings.
Fig. 6: Uncertainty in projected additional maize yield impact due to changing temperature–moisture couplings.

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Data availability

The datasets supporting the results of this paper are freely available from the references and links listed in Supplementary Table 1. The crop yield data are available from D.R. upon request. The intermediate datasets are available at https://github.com/clesk/couplings-heat-crops. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The processing and analysis codes are available at https://github.com/clesk/couplings-heat-crops.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. DGE—1644869. J.W. was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. BCS—184018. J.Z. acknowledges the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione grant no. 179876) and the Helmholtz Initiative and Networking Fund (Young Investigator Group COMPOUNDX, grant agreement no. VH-NG-1537). S.I.S. acknowledges support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (grant agreement no. 821003 (4C)) and the Swiss National Foundation in relation to the DAMOCLES COST Action (project ‘Compound events in a changing climate’). We thank J. Jägermeyr, J. Mankin, R. DeFries and M. Ting for constructive feedback on the methods and results. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated CMIP6. We thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data, and the funding agencies who support CMIP6 and ESGF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY, USA

    Corey Lesk & Radley Horton

  2. Department of Earth and Environmental Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Corey Lesk

  3. Department of Geography and the Environment, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Ethan Coffel

  4. Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Jonathan Winter

  5. Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA

    Deepak Ray

  6. Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Jakob Zscheischler

  7. Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Jakob Zscheischler

  8. Department of Computational Hydrosystems, Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Jakob Zscheischler

  9. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Sonia I. Seneviratne

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C.L., E.C. and J.W. designed and coordinated this research. C.L. conducted the analysis. All authors discussed the methods and results and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Corey Lesk.

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Lesk, C., Coffel, E., Winter, J. et al. Stronger temperature–moisture couplings exacerbate the impact of climate warming on global crop yields. Nat Food 2, 683–691 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00341-6

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