Addressing global hotspots of drought-related crop production losses

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.