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Changing risks of simultaneous global breadbasket failure

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 54–57 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

The risk of extreme climatic conditions leading to unusually low global agricultural production is exacerbated if more than one global ‘breadbasket’ is exposed at the same time. Such shocks can pose a risk to the global food system, amplifying threats to food security, and could potentially trigger other systemic risks1,2. While the possibility of climatic extremes hitting more than one breadbasket has been postulated3,4, little is known about the actual risk. Here we combine region-specific data on agricultural production with spatial statistics of climatic extremes to quantify the changing risk of low production for the major food-producing regions (breadbaskets) over time. We show an increasing risk of simultaneous failure of wheat, maize and soybean crops across the breadbaskets analysed. For rice, risks of simultaneous adverse climate conditions have decreased in the recent past, mostly owing to solar radiation changes favouring rice growth. Depending on the correlation structure between the breadbaskets, spatial dependence between climatic extremes globally can mitigate or aggravate the risks for the global food production. Our analysis can provide the basis for more efficient allocation of resources to contingency plans and/or strategic crop reserves that would enhance the resilience of the global food system.

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Fig. 1: Likelihood of simultaneous climate risks in the nine most important soybean-producing provinces in China threatening agricultural production.
Fig. 2: Likelihood of climatic conditions simultaneously threatening crop losses in the global breadbaskets.

Data availability

Crop yield data are taken from official governmental databases: data from Argentina can be accessed at http://www.siia.gov.ar/; from Australia at https://www.abs.gov.au; from Brazil at http://www.conab.gov.br; from China at http://data.stats.gov.cn/; from Europe and the Ukraine at http://www.fao.org/faostat/en; from India at http://eands.dacnet.nic.in/; from Indonesia at https://www.bps.go.id/linkTableDinamis/view/id/865; from Russia at http://cbsd.gks.ru/ and from the United States at http://quickstats.nass.usda.gov. Climate re-analysis data used in our analysis can be accessed at http://hydrology.princeton.edu/data/pgf/.

Code availability

The R script written to read and analyse data and generate figures can be accessed at https://github.com/FranziskaGaupp/Simultaneous_BB_failure

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the ECOCEP project, funded by the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IRSES, grant agreement no. 609642. Part of the research by S.H.-S. received funding from the Austrian Climate Research Program (KR15AC8K12597).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Franziska Gaupp & Jim Hall

  2. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Franziska Gaupp & Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler

  3. School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Simon Dadson

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Contributions

The analysis was conceived by F.G., J.H. and S.H.-S. and conducted by F.G. All authors contributed to writing the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Franziska Gaupp.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Christopher Bren d’Amour and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–8, Table 1 and references.

Supplementary Data 1

Calculations of expected crop losses in case of a breadbasket failure.

Supplementary Data 2

Pearson correlation coefficient (r) between Princeton re-analysis climatological data and detrended, observed historical subnational crop yield data.

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Gaupp, F., Hall, J., Hochrainer-Stigler, S. et al. Changing risks of simultaneous global breadbasket failure. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 54–57 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0600-z

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