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Robust assessment of climatic risks to crop production

Nature Food volume 6, pages 415–416 (2025)Cite this article

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In the face of ever-increasing climate extremes, robust crop–climate risk assessments are lacking, limiting our ability to transform towards more sustainable food production systems.

In an era of progressive global warming, the world is witnessing a surge in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts, excessive rain and compounding events1. The risks associated with these events often have devastating consequences for agricultural production, farmer livelihoods and food security, and dangerous nitrogen losses to the environment. Understanding and quantifying the risk of crop failure is crucial for devising strategies to improve food security and livelihoods in the short term, as well as for de-risking investment decisions of farmers, food system actors and policymakers around the longer-term transformation of agri-food systems towards sustainability2. Although the agricultural modelling community has made considerable strides in appraising the impacts of mean climate changes, there has been much less success in developing methods to assess risks from extreme weather3. Prominent agricultural projections have caught the attention of policymakers and adaptation planners using the best available tools4, but improvement is needed to support agricultural and food system interventions. Here, we outline critical research gaps to be addressed for the agricultural modelling community to support building scientific knowledge on which agricultural risks can be managed.

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Fig. 1: Basis for robust climate risk assessments of cropping systems.

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Acknowledgements

Y.-U.K. was supported by the Einstein Research Unit “Climate and Water under Change” (CliWaC) (grant number ERU-2020-609) from the Einstein Foundation Berlin and Berlin University Alliance. A.C.R. was supported by the NASA Earth Sciences Division via the NASA GISS Climate Impacts Group. H.W. was funded by the Leibniz Association Female Professorship (award number P102/2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg, Germany

    Yean-Uk Kim & Heidi Webber

  2. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA

    Alex C. Ruane

  3. Agricultural Economics and Policy Group, ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Robert Finger

  4. Institute of Environmental Sciences, Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany

    Heidi Webber

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  1. Yean-Uk Kim
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  2. Alex C. Ruane
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  4. Heidi Webber
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Correspondence to Heidi Webber.

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Kim, YU., Ruane, A.C., Finger, R. et al. Robust assessment of climatic risks to crop production. Nat Food 6, 415–416 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01168-1

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