Global scale climate–crop yield\nrelationships and the impacts of recent\nwarming
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory · Carnegie Institution for Science
Abstract
Changes in the global production of major crops are important drivers of food prices, food security and land use decisions. Average global yields for these commodities are determined by the performance of crops in millions of fields distributed across a range of management, soil and climate regimes. Despite the complexity of global food supply, here we show that simple measures of growing season temperatures and precipitation—spatial averages based on the locations of each crop—explain ∼30% or more of year-to-year variations in global average yields for the world’s six most widely grown crops. For wheat, maize and barley, there is a clearly negative response of global yields to increased temperatures. Based on…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 73.57
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 26
Authors
2Topics & keywords
- Environmental science
- Food security
- Climate change
- Precipitation
- Crop
- Global warming
- Yield (engineering)
- Crop yield