Addressing global hotspots of drought-related crop production losses
4 affiliations
- 1Department of Environment, Land, and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy. [email protected]
- 2Data Science Institute, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA. [email protected]
- 3Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA. [email protected]
- 4Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA. [email protected]
Abstract
Meeting future food demand will require transformations toward sustainable and resilient food systems that simultaneously increase production, minimize environmental impacts, and adapt to climate change. With fluctuations in temperature and precipitation exercising a growing influence on production stability across the planet, a detailed understanding of where cropping patterns are vulnerable to climatic stresses is a missing yet critical step for developing solutions that enhance the climate resilience of crop production. Here we address this urgent need by combining gridded climate data, spatially-explicit agricultural statistics, and process-based crop modeling to quantify global patterns of rainfed and irrigated crop climate sensitivity (measured as the percent reduction in median yield under extreme climate conditions) and climate-associated production losses for 17 major crops, accounting for 75% of global primary production. This climate sensitivity metric is ideally suited for identifying locations where each crop tends to be subject to high climate variability and where crop production may be susceptible to high climate-related production losses. We estimate -10.1% and -6.8% losses in global rainfed and irrigated production (respectively) under historically observed extreme climate conditions - enough calories to feed 2.1 billion people - and find hotspots of climate sensitivity in the central US, eastern Brazil, the Mediterranean basin, and South Asia, among other regions. We then focus on monsoon cereals (rice, maize, millet, sorghum) to illustrate how sustainable irrigation expansion and targeted crop switching could reduce climate sensitivity, finding that 62% of production losses could be avoided while increasing overall production by 14%. Our new scalable and universal approach to measuring the climate sensitivity of crops enables the assessment of where climate-related production losses tend to be largest and where mitigating actions and investments can be proactively targeted to better ensure the stability and increased supply of global crop production.
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BibTeX
@article{tuninetti2026addressing,
title = {{Addressing global hotspots of drought-related crop production losses}},
author = {Marta Tuninetti and Kyle Frankel Davis},
journal = {Nature Communications},
year = {2026},
month = may,
doi = {10.1038/s41467-026-72715-y},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72715-y},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Addressing global hotspots of drought-related crop production losses
AU - Marta Tuninetti
AU - Kyle Frankel Davis
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/19
JO - Nature Communications
DO - 10.1038/s41467-026-72715-y
UR - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72715-y
AB - Meeting future food demand will require transformations toward sustainable and resilient food systems that simultaneously increase production, minimize environmental impacts, and adapt to climate change. With fluctuations in temperature and precipitation exercising a growing influence on production stability across the planet, a detailed understanding of where cropping patterns are vulnerable to climatic stresses is a missing yet critical step for developing solutions that enhance the climate resilience of crop production. Here we address this urgent need by combining gridded climate data, spatially-explicit agricultural statistics, and process-based crop modeling to quantify global patterns of rainfed and irrigated crop climate sensitivity (measured as the percent reduction in median yield under extreme climate conditions) and climate-associated production losses for 17 major crops, accounting for 75% of global primary production. This climate sensitivity metric is ideally suited for identifying locations where each crop tends to be subject to high climate variability and where crop production may be susceptible to high climate-related production losses. We estimate -10.1% and -6.8% losses in global rainfed and irrigated production (respectively) under historically observed extreme climate conditions - enough calories to feed 2.1 billion people - and find hotspots of climate sensitivity in the central US, eastern Brazil, the Mediterranean basin, and South Asia, among other regions. We then focus on monsoon cereals (rice, maize, millet, sorghum) to illustrate how sustainable irrigation expansion and targeted crop switching could reduce climate sensitivity, finding that 62% of production losses could be avoided while increasing overall production by 14%. Our new scalable and universal approach to measuring the climate sensitivity of crops enables the assessment of where climate-related production losses tend to be largest and where mitigating actions and investments can be proactively targeted to better ensure the stability and increased supply of global crop production.
SN - 2041-1723
ER -